Touted as the future of language teaching, task-based pedagogy is grounded in current Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories, and is in line with the trend of learner-centeredness in general education. However, the method has yet to be fully embraced by the language teaching community due to the lack of 1) clear delineation of pedagogical procedures, and 2) quality research on implementation and evaluation of task-based programs. In this study, two different task-based teaching methods, namely, task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-supported language teaching (TSLT), were implemented in a college-level Chinese class for beginners (n=41) for 14 weeks. The effects of each instructional approach were evaluated and their relative effectiveness compared. The study also contributes to the thorny debate of how grammar is most effectively learned and taught in foreign language classrooms.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1982. / Bibliography: leaves 149-157. / Microfiche. / xii, 157 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

The purpose of the study was to determine the "interlanguage" characteristics in Chinese-American college writers' texts. Also, the study sought to determine the connections between their "interlanguage" characteristics at the syntactic and discourse levels and their cultural values and linguistic backgrounds. The population of the study consisted of 3 randomly selected Chinese-American students who have taken freshman writing classes at UCLA.The methods employed in this case study were context-sensitive textual analysis and qualitative techniques. In the context-sensitive analysis, twenty-four academic papers by these students were analyzed from four angles--error analysis, syntactic fluency analysis, cohesive ties analysis, syntactic construction analysis, and discourse organization pattern analysis. In the use of qualitative techniques, twenty-seven interviews were carried out, two recordings of family dinner and party were analyzed, and answers to questionnaires were studied.Findings support the hypothesis of the study--there are characteristic features in the texts by Chinese-American writers, and these characteristics at both syntactic and discourse levels have correlations to their linguistic background and cultural values. At the discourse level, the essay organization in these students' essays tends to follow an indirect pattern as Kaplan has claimed in his 1966's study. At the syntactic level, thekinds of errors occurring in these students' texts are the same as ESL Chinese students' errors, which supports the research findings by Zhu Hong, Hu, and other ESL researchers. Thus, the study has made two-fold connections--between Chinese-American college writers' texts and their cultural and contextual backgrounds and between ESL studies and composition studies.The implications of the research findings for the teaching of basic writing and future research in the field are discussed in the last chapter to enhance Chinese-American students' as well as their writing teachers' awareness of their writing characteristics and of connections between their cultural values and linguistic background. / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Chinese