The Application Of TBLT To English Major's Oral English Teaching In Vocational College

Nowadays, it is highly necessary and vital for the Chinese to learn English, especially in a more open China today. With the advent of the global information era and the further reinforcement of the international communication, the urgency and significance for people to communicate skillfully in English has gradually been concentrated. However the current situation of oral English teaching, especially in vocational college, can not satisfy the requirement of competitive society.Chinese vocational college students are a special kind of students and different from the ordinary university students. They are required to be practical workers instead of the academic ones especially the students majoring in business English they should be able to communicate effectively in their business activities and it is very necessary and important for them to improve their oral English and communicative competence. The Ministry of Education emphasizes that the English teachers should teach the essential English knowledge and the basic skills to the vocational college students, at the same time the teachers should foster their ability of practically using English to communicate. In the practical teaching, the vocational college students are usually of low oral language proficiency and they are not confident with their oral English, as a result they do not have positive attitude toward speaking English. The English teachers in vocational colleges are eager to find an effective teaching method to improve the students'oral English.In recent years, Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) has aroused extensive attention. Based on the development of applied linguistics, the second language acquisition, learning theory and the instructional theory, this relatively new teaching method was evolved from communicative language teaching and slowly emerged since the 1980s, which emphasizes"learning by doing"and offers students an opportunity to make language in the classroom meaningful. Some of the researchers have studied on the effectiveness of applying the teaching method to English studies, but few of them have done on the effectiveness of applying TBLT to oral English teaching in vocational colleges. So the author carried out a study on the application of TBLT to English major's students'oral English teaching in Jiangxi College of Foreign Studies. At the beginning of this academic term, the author used a pre-test to exam the student's oral English proficiency and found that the students'oral English proficiency is generally low. Then the author used a pre-questionnaire to investigate the current situation of English major's students'oral English learning to find out the reasons that they are low in oral English proficiency and the problems hindering their oral English learning. The results show that there are many factors that affect the students'speaking ability including the students'factor, the teacher's factor, and the learning environment. To improve the students'oral English proficiency and resolve the problems hindering the students'oral English learning, the author applied TBLT to the oral English classroom in Jiangxi College of Foreign Studies. At the end of the academic term, according to a post-test, a post-questionnaire and the interviews the author found that task-based oral English teaching is possible and effective in improving the students'speaking ability.