Task Design In Teaching Oral Business English

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) has gained popularity in the field of language teaching since 1990s. Ever since its emergence, English teaching practitioners have been attracted by the rationale of "learning by doing", and taken TBLT as an effective method to accelerate language development and acquisition.In China TBLT has been put into practice in classrooms of general English as well as business English so as to cultivate students'reading, writing and oral skills. After investigating some studies on application of TBLT in Oral Business English (OBE) classes, the author finds out that TBLT was carried out in a broader sense with little consideration given to task design itself.Given that situation, this study proposes that before carrying out TBLT in OBE classes, there should be a task design process. As one of the key factors to task design, OBE communicative competence should be taken into consideration. By analyzing the related proclaims of significant scholars, the author defines OBE communicative competence, and incorporates it into task design dimensions. Other valuable elements in task design are task type and task complexity as they assert influences on task performance in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity. In this study, genre and genre analysis, one of the instruments for designing tasks, are used to analyze the functions of business spoken discourse in specific communicative context, and integrated into tasks and task implementation phases. In this way, tasks are designed to centre on schematic structure of OBE genre, focusing on language strategies for particular communicative purposes in order to develop students' communicative competence.