Reconsideration Of Task Design In Reading & Writing Course Books Of College English Series

"Materials", is always called"course books". Course book, just as its name implies, is the essence of a course. It is the foundation for students to learn a course, and also the main dependence for teachers to teach a course well. With the development of education, psychology, applied linguistics, second language acquisition theories, and FLT studies, the role of modern course books has changed greatly. Different from the traditional ones, modern course books are regarded as a trigger for learners'learning and a stimulus for their communicative reaction. This kind of course books put more emphasis on the learning process, that is to say, it more emphasizes learners'learning experience, mentally emotion and communicative process when they learn a language. In this case, the roles of teacher and student undertake a fundamental change: they are now the sharers of the target language. While, the essential way of this change of role is by force of exercises, in other words, tasks in the thesis.The quality of course books depends, to a large extent, on that of the tasks since it is the essential of the whole course book. In China, course books actually began to be a focus of study much lately. Micro-evaluation research with the focus being on task design was rather rare; furthermore, the existed researches were carried out mostly from the perspective of researchers and materials'compilers. Different from these previous researches, the study in this thesis belongs to the category of micro-evaluation with the focus being on task design from the perspective of the most direct participants in using materials—students and teachers. It is hoped that the study can be of some use for the material compilers to identify strengths and weaknesses of task types in currently-used College English course books, so that optimum can be made of their strong points, whilst their weaker area can be strengthened through adaptation or by supplementing with other task forms.Taking the Reading & Writing Course books of New Horizon College English series as a starting point, the thesis aims at investigating and evaluating modern college English course books from the perspective of its task design. To facilitate the evaluation process, Littlejohn's definition of'task', which has been broadened to incorporate both communicative tasks and traditional exercises, was adopted in this thesis. Besides, this study employed both quantitative and qualitative designs. In the quantitative part, it examined 330 non-English major college students from three universities in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region through questionnaire. In the qualitative part, it examined 6 college English teachers through an interview.The major findings from the study shows: Firstly, teachers and students regard the current tasks in Reading & Writing Course Books were unsatisfactory as a whole. Essentially, the task design still follows the traditional exercise mold. Too much attention was paid to the text itself, or vocabulary and grammar, and the students'competence of using language was rather neglected. Secondly, the most frequently used task types in Reading & Writing Course Books do have pedagogical values, but they did not hold much potential for promoting communicative use of the language learned, nor could they adequately meet students'needs. Furthermore, it couldn't fully arouse students'interest. Thirdly, the most frequently used classroom procedure for dealing tasks was IRF (i.e. teacher initiates, student responds and teacher gives feedback) pattern, which indicated little potential for real classroom communication, self-expression, self-interpretation and personal creativity. In most cases, students were doing the tasks in isolation: apart from the real communicative context and the students'own experiences and feelings. Students failed to have a sense of achievement/improvement after finishing the tasks.According to the findings of study, some suggestions about how to improve the task types and how to supplement the currently-used task forms with other forms were proposed. Issues like task variety, task continuity, task settings, real-world tasks as well as the interrelationship between form and function in tasks need to be considered in the task designing process. Finally, based on some famous and much quoted models on experiential learning by former scholars, a more communicative mode to tasks design in Reading & Writing Course books was presented. This mode incorporates more communicative tasks and at the same time gives traditional task types due attention. It tasks into account of both language use and usage, and can hopefully strengthen the students'competence of language practical use.Task design in English course books is a thought-provoking research topic in modern foreign language teaching realm, and it is still brand-new in China at present. Since this study was carried out in a limited scale, it is impossible to investigate all the problems in an all-round way. To conclude, the thesis points out limitations of the present study and provide recommendation for further research.