Abstract:The general aim of language teaching is to develop students' communicative competence and language awareness. Task-based instruction, which was born in western cultural backgrounds, originated in 1970s. It refers to a type of language teaching approach which leads students to learn English by fulfilling a real task in order to improve their ability of using English. Task-based instruction, which is based upon a great deal of research done by foreign language teaching researchers both at home and abroad, has been regarded as one of the most effective language teaching methods. Task-based instruction was actively advocated by New English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education which was the document issued by the Ministry of Education in the year of 2001, and it has been widely implemented in middle school English teaching throughout China since 2003. In China, most of the existing researches on Task-based instruction are on its application to the teaching of listening, speaking, reading or writing, yet few of them have a systematic study of application of Task-based instruction to middle school English teaching. Guided by the framework of Jane Willis, this thesis tempts to use a certain unit as the typical example to illustrate the application of Task-based instruction to middle school English teaching.

Key words：task; Task-based Instruction; middle school English learning

摘要:语言教学的目的是为了培养学生的语言交际能力和语言意识。一种诞生于西方文化背景下的教学法-任务型教学法兴起于19世纪70年代,它是一种强调学生通过在课堂中创设真实的情景来完成语言习得的教学方法。国内外的外语教育工作者已经做了大量关于任务型教学法的研究,实践证明其对外语教学非常有效。2001年,教育部颁布了《新课标》,积极倡导任务型教学法。自2003年以来,任务型教学法在全国中学英语教育中得到广泛运用。在国内,已经有很多学者做了大量关于任务型教学法应用于英语听力、口语、阅读和写作中的研究,然而还是很少有人系统的研究如何将任务型教学法应用于初中英语教学活动中。本文的重点就是运用Jane Willis提出的任务型教学实施的理论框架,以某一单元为例阐述任务型教学法在中学英语教学中的应用。

关键词：任务；任务型教学法；中学英语教学