An Exploration Of The Task-Based Approach To The Teaching Of College English

TBLT (task-based language teaching) is becoming a catchword in the English teaching circles. This relatively new teaching methodology was evolved from CLT (communicative language teaching) and slowly emerged since the 1980, which emphasizes "learning by doing" and offers students an opportunity to make language in the classroom meaningful therefore memorable. The primary focus of classroom activity is the task and language is the instrument which students use to complete it. The task is an activity in which students use language to achieve a specific outcome. The activity reflects real life and learners focus on meaning; they are free to use any language they want. Playing a game, solving a problem or sharing information or experiences, can all be considered as relevant and authentic tasks. In the May of 2001, the new curriculum compiled by the Department of Education requests teachers should avoid the teaching method of simply teaching language knowledge. It proposes the mode of task-based teaching and during the teaching process teachers should train the students' comprehensive language abilities. It proposes the learning by means of experience, practice, participation, communication and cooperation. Due to the utility of the English teaching at college levels and that at the primary and the secondary levels, the college English teaching requirements should be coordinated with the New Curriculum (Dai, 2001). Considering the inefficiency of the college English teaching, which has always been dominated by the traditional teaching method, Xia (2001) proposed the task-based approach to the teaching of College English, made the learning process full of real personal meaning, and developed students' linguistic competence and other skills necessary for their making a living. However, many College English teachers still don't have enough knowledge about this teaching methodology and aren't sure how to operate it. This paper focused on these questions and how to operate the approach to the teaching of College English based on the researcher's first hand experience.The researcher first raised the necessity of carrying out the task-based teaching, gave a deep research into the classical theory of Willis and took a good look at the current research situation in China. Then, the definition, classification and structure oftask and the theoretical basis of task-based teaching were stated. The most important part of the paper focused on how to launch the task-based approach to the teaching of College English. Due to the absence of the task-based College English textbooks, how to adapt the non-task-based materials to fit a task-based framework was discussed in it. Questionnaires, interviews and journal keeping was conducted to find the practical steps to carry out the task-based teaching, The statistics from the questionnaire showed the recognition of students to the new teaching method and the comprehension of students' own tendency on how to implement the classroom activities. Next, an experiment of two teaching methods was carried out in two classes, one being the traditional PPP teaching, and the other being TBL teaching. The purpose of the experiment was to compare and contrast the students' affective factors of language learning and the roles students and teachers played respectively in two classes so that the better one could be proposed.The result showed that the task-based approach to the teaching of College English could be taken into four steps. The first is the preparation for the task, in which students were divided into groups with five or six members, one being the group leader. Each group was heterogeneous with different sex, achievement and personality (extrovert or introvert) taken into consideration. In this way, every group shares a similarity and each member of the group hold differences from each other so that the fair competition will be achieved among the group. The second step was introduction to the task in which the designing of the task based on the textbook was critical for the success of the teaching. Th...