The Effect of Task-based Language Teaching on Listening Comprehension for Senior High School Students

1.Introduction "Taiwan also placed No.16 among 20 Asian countries in last years International English Language Testing System (IELTS) results." reported from The China Post in 2007. The result also reveals that in the four language skills Taiwanese students have the worst performance in writing, the best in reading, and the speaking performance was better than the listening performance. In the report above, people can find that Taiwanese students don't achieve good scores in both receptive and productive skills, such as listening and writing.

Most language teachers judge language proficiency via performance in activities or in tests, so performance of speaking and writing is significant. Speaking performance is, especially, more often evaluated to indicate individual competence than writing performance. Moreover, due to the interactive relationship of listening and speaking, most language teachers also have to put their focuses on listening attainment. That is, worse mastery of listening skills may affect mastery of speaking skills. For this reason, this research focuses on listening comprehension, and, in the trend of the

communicative approach, the researcher takes Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) as a model.

In the research, the researcher wants to examine the effects of instruction of Taskbased Language Teaching on a group of senior high school students. The students will join the TBLT program for four weeks, twice a week, and one-time, two-hours in class. Two equivalent classes of identical instruction period are used. The researcher provides one group with TBLT. The other group will receive traditional English teaching, such as ALM. "The upshot is that all assessment of listening and reading must be made on the basis of observing the test-taker's speaking or writing (or nonverbal response), and not on the listening or reading itself. So, all assessment of receptive performance must be made by inference!" (Brown, 2004, p.118) Based on this, we try to understand that whether the conduction of TBLT improve senior high school students listening comprehension through their language performance.

Research questions: Does TBLT enhance students listening comprehension?

2. Literature review
Task-Based Language Teaching: Task-based Language Teaching is at the very heart of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) (Ellis, 2003). More specifically, Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) refers to an approach based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). Focusing on task, a pedagogical task is a piece of classroom work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and an end (Nunan, 2004).

Listening comprehension: Most important in a communicative approach to listening is the listener's purpose and expectation, followed by other important factors: listeners are expected to respond; they can generally see the speaker; they derive clues from the environment; and they expect speech to be given in short chunks and to be informal in nature (Ur, 1984).

Specifically, the process of understanding speech in a second or foreign language, the study of listening comprehension processes in second language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic units (e.g. PHONEMEs, WORDs, grammatical structures) as well as the role of the listeners expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge and the topic (Richards, Platt, & Platt, 1998).

3. Method
Research participants: Research participants are 64 senior high school students randomly selected from those qualifying in GEPT elementary level in private high school. There will be an equal number of male and female high school students from two classes. 32 participants, 16 males and 16 females, are in the experimental group and control group, respectively.

Materials: The content of the teaching material is based on IVY GEPT intermediate level English learning book. The content of pre-test and post-test is also derived from IVY GEPT intermediate level English learning book, but the content of pre-test and posttest is designed differently. The content of test, especially, focuses on the part of listening. The interview record book and audio cassette and tape will be used to record

students comments regarding TBLT. The length of a tape is 60 minutes. Students comments will be classified into the positive part and the negative part.

Procedure: The time span of this study will be four weeks. The pre-test will be conducted with all the students one week before implementing this study. The methods of instruction will be conducted twice a week and one hour at a time. The instruction derived from the basis of the task-based language instruction will be divided into three stages, pre-task, task, and post-task. The task which requires the students to accomplish is making a three-day trip plan. In the stage of pre-task, the instructor will introduce the topic, clarify task instruction, help the students learn or recall useful words and phrases to facilitate task accomplishment, and provide partial demonstration of task procedures. In the phase of the task, the students will separate into groups to perform a role play, and they need to involve the activities of the negotiation and discussion to reach the requirements of the task. In this time, the instructor will give an adequate assistance if the students ask. In the time of post-task, the students will listen to a recording of native speakers doing the same task and compare the difference between them. After that, the instructor will ask the students to report shortly how they accomplish the task. Then, the instructor will give the students correct vocabularies, phrases, and

sentences structures that are appropriate for this situation and conduct practice activities. After four weeks, the post-test will be given to all students. The next day of the post-test, the interview will be conducted to the students in the experimental group. Those participants will be interviewed in 10-15 minutes one student at a time with audio cassette recording.

Analysis: To compare the effects of two methods, the statistical analyses will be conducted between- and within- groups. The independent t-test will used in the experimental group and control group to examine whether there is a difference in pre-test and whether improvement is significant in the post-test. The paired-t-test will used to examine if the improvement is prominent between pre-test and post-test in the experimental group and control group, respectively. The gathered data from the interview will be coding to decide which part with respect to the positive part or the negative part. For instance, the sentence I think I make progress in English listening comprehension after the teaching program will be regarded as a positive sentence. In contrast, the sentence I dont consider that my English listening comprehension gets any progress after the teaching program will be regarded as a negative sentence.

Reference

Brown, H.D. (2004). Language assessment principles and classroom practices. White Plains, NY: Longman. Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language teaching and learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nunan, D. (2004). Task-based language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Pien, J. (2007, August 22). Taiwan ranks 17th on IELTS scores, behind Japan, Korea. Taiwan: The China Post. Retrieved from January 16, 2009, from http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/2007/08/22/119333/Taiwan-ranks.htm Richards, J.C. & Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Richards, J.C., Platt, J., & Platt, H. (1998). Dictionary of language teaching & applied linguistics. Hong Kong: Longman. Ur., P. (1984). Teaching listening comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.