The rudiment of the conception of communicative tasks can be seen in the task teaching method in communicative teaching approach. With the deepening of people’s knowledge to the nature of language as well as the continuous development of psycholinguistics, some of the applied linguistics started to move the key points of the second language teaching from the teaching results to the process of learning and teaching, emphasizing to let the learners to complete a series of teaching assignments by using the target language. What’s more, in the process of classroom teaching, the real communicative activities should be involved to improve the efficiency of learning.
The so-called communicative tasks should be the refining and summarization of language communication activity from the perspectives of language teaching and language learning. It is transformed from the specific communicative process. Since each communicative task should be implemented to the relative language materials and need to be finished with the help of the target language, it indicates the language communication task as a matter of fact. Just as those foreign students who study in Mandarin learning courses in China are told, the communicative task is composed of communication purpose, language function, context, and theme and language factors.
The communicative task has three obvious characteristics, the first of which is the purposiveness because the purpose of a communicative task is to help the learners to finish certain specific activity and conquer the obstacles. The second point is that it has strong functionality which is composed of various factors like expression function, communicative function, interactive function and adjustment function. The last but not least feature of communicative task is the obvious situationality and theme. Usually speaking, it is always combined with typical scenes and methods and then processed by focusing on certain themes or communicative activities. In addition, the language materials on the basis of utterance and discourse are also essential contents for communicative task.
The characteristics of the communicative task mentioned above are proper for the teaching that with the goal of training communicative skills and the teaching with short cycle, high efficiency and practicability, flexibility and interestingness. When students learn Mandarin, they may also find that it is more effective to study in the teaching process with communicative task. One point needs attention is that the teachers should describe the task and activity will be held to the students to ensure the basic features of the communicative task in each stage.