A Practical Study On The Application Of Task-based Approach To English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

The task-based language teaching is put forward by foreign researchers in 1980s, and is widely accepted and employed in many counties. This teaching approach focuses on learners and emphasizes"learning by doing", that is, learners learn a language by completing a series of tasks. The aims of the task-based language teaching are to arouse learners'interest and motivation in learning English through fulfilling tasks and by doing that improving their English comprehensive competence. In order to achieve these goals, the task designing should simulate a real life context in which learners can use the learned language to communicate with each other. Based on its unique advantages and the unsatisfactory English teaching situation, the new English Curriculum Standard (2001) advocates the implementation of the task-based language teaching in English teaching class.Although at present many experts and researchers have conducted researches on the theory of task-based language teaching approach and some teachers have made efforts to apply it to the teaching practice, there still exist some problems on how to apply this approach effectively, especially on how to apply it into English reading teaching in senior high schools. In other words, this new approach is lack of explicit practical instruction. In addition, some English teachers are short of convention on employing the task-based language teaching. In their class, they still adopt the PPP (Presentation, Practice, and Production) teaching method which focuses on language form and is tightly controlled by teacher. Hence, it is urgent to do an empirical research on the implementation of the task-based language in English reading teaching.This paper tries to test whether task-based language teaching approach has the effect in arousing students'interest and improve their reading ability. Taking the opportunity of teaching English as an intern in Xinxiang No.2 Senior High School, the writer carries out an experiment. The writer takes Class 3 as the control class in which the students are taught by the PPP model and Class 4 as the experimental class in which the students are taught by task-based language teaching. Each class has 62 students. Test, questionnaire and classroom observation are used as instruments in the experiments to compare and analyze the results of this experiment. The pre-test is carried out at the beginning of the experiment. It aims at checking whether there exists difference in English competence between the control class and the experimental class. At the end of the experiment, a post-test is conducted which aims to see which class has made more progress in reading comprehension after employing different teaching methods. Moreover, this paper provides two different reading teaching plans using the task-based language teaching and the PPP model. After the experiment, all the students are asked to answer the questionnaire. The questionnaire is mainly about the students'attitude and feedback about the task-based language teaching.After eight weeks, the writer collects and analyses the relevant data from the pre-test, the post-test and the questionnaire, and summarizes the class observation, on the basis of which we arrive at the conclusion that task-based language teaching can effectively improve students'learning interest, motivation and reading ability.