Student-centred Task-based Model-Modification Of New College English

For many years, traditional approaches to English teaching in classrooms has been dominated by the teacher, with the teacher imparting knowledge all the time, while students being passive recipients. In consequence, the shortcomings have become apparent. After learning English for a few years, students have good linguistic competence, but are lacking in communicative competence. "Dumb English " is a good case in point. What's more, there is little enthusiasm in improving teaching material or methodology to meet students' requirement. Another more recent impetus is our entry to WTO in 2001. With our integration into global economy, the demand for talented people with both professional knowledge and excellent language abilities is getting stronger and stronger. English, as an international language, becomes increasingly significant, and training interdisciplinary and application-oriented talent of foreign languages has been called for in our times. Therefore, it is urgent that reforms should be conducted in the classroom to make up this deficiency.It is commonly thought that college students can learn a foreign language well through participation in communicative activities of all kinds. Out of an awareness of the existing problems and based upon New College English Syllabus and Chinese EFL reality, New College English series emerge. The series attempt to deal with the relationship between teaching and learning from a new angle, and point out the trend in English teaching in China. It adopts a brand-new student-centred topic-based compiling approach, which is intended to develop students' ability to utilize the language. It furnishes students with immense topics to develop their productive competence. However, certain obstacles do exist in implementing this series of books. Teachers and students who have taken this course book have come away with the uneasy feeling that such an approach does not seem to produce desired results. Teachers find themselves on the horns of a dilemma when confronted with students with antipathetic attitudes toward classroom activities. Sostudents' performance is collected in CET-4 between 2000 and 2002 in succession, and a questionnaire survey is conducted to collect information about the implementation of this book and students' attitudes towards it. It is revealed that overemphasis on fluency with the neglect of students' cognitive ability has led to various deficiencies. The present writer holds that students' cognitive ability has to be taken into account, or else a balance between fluency, accuracy, and complexity cannot be achieved, which is contagious to their English learning in the long term. Therefore the paper proposes Task-based Approach for its improvement.The present writer sets out to examine the guiding principles and theoretical basis underlying the book and its specific features including both merits and demerits from various aspects. It is found that this series are lacking in the training of linguistic competence, grammatical exercises are nowhere to be found. It stresses fluency on one hand, but how to obtain macro-skills to achieve fluency has been totally neglected on the other. More significantly, many materials selected are not systematically graded, which makes it impossible for both students and the teacher to keep track of their language development. As a matter of fact, with the increasing enrollment of college students, a great majority still get confused about rules in language and in communication, despite the fact that they have acquired a certain amount of grammatical knowledge in middle school. Materials have to be well-chosen so that salience and noticing can be contrived, and students' attention can be allocated to form to ensure language development. Thereby, the present writer reviews in great depth the theoretical basis of Cognitive Approach, information-processing theory, and Task-based Approach. Brumfit( 1984:51) makes the point that accuracy and fluency are not opposites, but are complementary; and fluency has to be understood in al...