Abstract-The survey was conducted on 96 engineering sophomores in a northwest university in MainlandChina with the purpose to investigate their favorite communicative tasks, their perceptions on their task performance as well as their opinions on the teacher role in the classroom. Besides, the study also tries to explore the correlations between different variables like scores of national College English Test Band 4 scores 1 , participation frequency, and self-evaluation of personal performance. The results reveal a panorama of a Chinese task-based English class. First and foremost, the students' preferred tasks are mostly two-way divergent group tasks. In addition, most students reported that participating in the tasks was very "exciting" and "beneficial", while over a quarter students reported that they were somewhat disappointed at their own task performances. Thirdly, they perceived the college English teacher as a facilitator and tutor in learning strategies. Finally, the results show that the more frequent the students participate in different tasks, the better they evaluate their own performance. Besides, the higher the band 4 scores are, the more frequent they are willing to participate. This study sheds lights on the important issues for task-based instruction and helps English teachers and curriculum designers to address the students' needs from the learner's perspectives. Implications for the implementation of task-based language teaching are discussed.

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This study compared the perception of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones by 20 adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers and 17 Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners with different levels of Chinese proficiency. We were particularly interested in confirming the effects of language experience and further assessing how Chinese proficiency might influence the perception of Mandarin lexical tones. Three types of continuum were used in identification and discrimination tasks, including tone 1 (T1)/tone 2 (T2), tone 1/tone 4 (T4) and tone 2/tone 4. Unlike the native speakers of Chinese who demonstrated clear categorical perception for all the continua, the CFL learners showed reduced accuracy in identification and discrimination results. Furthermore, proficiency data correlated with categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones, suggesting that categorical perception of key phonological contrasts in the second language can be considered as a reliable indicator of language proficiency.

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