An Empirical Study Of Task-Based Approach In Overcoming Classroom Reticence

Asian students, especially Chinese students have been alleged to be reticent learners in foreign language teaching. They are unwilling to take part in classroom activities, reluctant to give responses, and passive and reticent in English teaching. Therefore, English classroom reticence has been discussed extensively recently. On the one hand the previous research attributed the causes of classroom reticence to culture, ways of questioning and students'characters, but paid little attention to the teaching methods. On the other hand, in the process of English teaching many teachers still use the traditional teaching method. Therefore, in order to overcome classroom reticence, the author tried to explore this phenomenon from the teaching methods, a new perspective.In order to make a deep research of classroom reticence, the first thing we should do is to have a full understanding of various causes of classroom reticence. Many researchers paid attention to the causes and solutions of classroom reticence, but the feasibility and effectiveness of the solutions failed to be tested in practice. On the basis of the theories of classroom reticence and task-based approach this thesis investigated the causes of vocational students'classroom reticence and then proposed to apply task-based approach which is favorable for communicative competence in English classroom to overcome classroom reticence. The causes of vocational students'classroom reticence were investigated by a questionnaire. The subjects of the questionnaire were composed of 114 students. The results of the questionnaire showed that students'low English proficiency, lack of motivation, students'characters, the teaching methods and the teacher's role are the main causes of classroom reticence. Then the task-based approach was applied to the classroom teaching to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of the task-based approach played in overcoming classroom reticence. The quantitative and qualitative methods including the pre and post tests, questionnaire and audio-recording and so on were adopted in experiment. Before the experiment, the pre-tests was conducted among all the freshmen of Shandong Agricultural Administrators College aimed to select two proximal-level classes in which the students'English achievements and classroom reticence level are similar as the subjects of the experiment, one as the comparison class and the other as the experiment class. And then the task-based approach was applied to the experiment class and the traditional teaching method was applied to the comparison class. The pre and post-tests of students'English achievements and classroom reticence level and three audio-recordings were made in the process of the experiment.The data was analyzed by SPSS, and the results of the experiment are as follows:(1) The task-based approach is more effective in overcoming students'classroom reticence than the traditional teaching method. The task-based approach created an active and encouraging English learning circumstance and it aroused the students'interests of learning and made more and more students take part in the classroom activities.(2) The task-based approach is more effective in improving students'English achievements and language skills than the traditional teaching method.At last, the author made a conclusion of this thesis and proposed the major findings and limitations of this thesis and suggestions for further research.