Designing Communicative Tasks For College English Course

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is based on the development of communicative language teaching, input and interactionist theory and the learning theory. With solid theoretical basis and profound empirical data, TBLT shows great attraction to syllabus designers, language teachers and also language learners. Yet it's still a new teaching method for most of the college English teachers in China to learn.The hard core of TBLT is how to design appropriate tasks to meet the needs of foreign language teaching and learning. Generally speaking, tasks design, which includes communicative tasks design and learning tasks design, can develop students'ability to use English in an all-round way. One of the main purpose of communicative tasks is to foster the learners'communcative competence, therefore, how to design valid communicative tasks is the linchpin of college English teaching.So, this thesis studies the scientific and effective use of TBLT in China focusing on the current college English teaching textbooks. The author studies the theoretical foundation of TBLT first, and then makes careful research on discussing the principles of communicative tasks design. This thesis also recalls the literature review of communicative tasks, discusses the components of communicative tasks, analyzes two key problems the non-English major freshmen facing in the process of developing their communicative competence. These two problems are : a, the non-English major students show a lower rate of vebal participation in classroom activities; b, they fail to express themselves in oral English with bisic fluency and accuracy. At the same time, the author introduces four kinds of current college English courses briefly. In line with that, this thesis mainly focuses on exploring how to design effective communicative tasks to solve those two problems of the non-English major freshmen in the process of developing their abilities in oral English. Therefore, the author proposes two approaches of communicative tasks design to solve the learners'two problems, one is goal-oriented communicative tasks, the other is post-task cycle language focus on phrase. Especially, the author also makes an impirical study on implementing communicative tasks of college English course in detail, which shows that the communicative tasks design is effective with empirical data.This thesis studies the theory and practice of communicative tasks with practical use of this approach as its goal. It clarifies the theoretical foundation of TBLT from...