| Higher Vocational &Technical Education (HVTE) has a late start in China, but it hasgrown and developed at amazing speed since 1990s. It is playing an increasingly importantrole in the nurturing of practice-inclined talents in the sectors of production, technology,service and so on, so it has drawn greater attention and been attached greater values. With thedeeper development of economic globalization, the nation demand for professionals engagedin business activities has increasingly added. As a result, business English has received moreand more concern from vocational colleges. Many of them have set up it and teachingstudents the basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation about it.Practicality-inclined objective of HVTE further defines the significance and the value ofcommunicative competence training，which has made a higher requirement for the Englishproficiency of vocational college students. Unfortunately there is, to a large extent, acontradiction between this objective and the current teaching mode.The present business teaching at vocational colleges lays more stress on the study oflexical meaning, semantic features and syntax. As we all know, this way has many advantages,which has been proved effective. However, with the development of the internationaleconomy, communicative competence becomes very important, especially in the aspect oflistening and speaking. Some negative influences have appeared. This kind of situation is notsuitable to vocational colleges’characteristics and not good to improve the students’communicative competence. So it can hardly guarantee the teaching effect. Besides, thedifficulty in studying English listening & speaking also affects the students’interest andconfidence in learning English. Compared with reading and writing skills, their listening &speaking abilities in business English are not satisfying. The traditional teaching method inlistening and speaking and teaching effects can hardly meet the market demand forpracticality-inclined graduates. The students’listening & speaking abilities in business atvocational colleges are far from satisfactory under the traditional way.In the traditional teaching model, most teachers still use the teaching-oriented methodand take too long time in teaching of each lesson. While for the students in class, what they do are mainly listening, checking and correcting. Most of the time, the students are in a stateof passive acceptance, which lacks of participation and interaction. This kind of teachingmodel leads to a direct result: the students have been used to the passive teacher-centeredlearning model, which has been greatly dependent on teachers, students thus impede and stopself-generated motivation for learning, causing that their learning autonomy is low in general.Traditional teacher-centered teaching method has difficulty significantly in improvinglistening & speaking abilities of students and in meeting the requirements of the major with apurpose of making preparations for students’future jobs. Therefore, in order to improve thesituation, in view of shortcomings and advantages of vocational students, more and moreEnglish teachers are exploring task-based teaching method.Task-based teaching method has played an important role in the field of English teaching.It has been concerned deeply in recent years and it is advocated by the Ministry of Education.For it the teaching philosophy is“learning by doing”, which is widely used in different kindsof teaching activities. It advocates a learner-centered approach to teaching. Teachers arerequired to carefully arrange a series of teaching tasks to guide students for learningeffectively, mastering and applying the language well. It can create real, practical, effectivelanguage learning environment for students for strengthening and improving with a variety ofmeaningful activities or tasks. It can arouse students’interest in learning, increase theircommunication and cooperation, and promote their language acquisition. Using this methodwill improve their business English listening & speaking abilities really and teaching aimscan be achieved better. This paper hopes to explore the effectiveness of task-based teachingmethod in business English listening & speaking at vocational colleges.Hypotheses of this study are: (1) task-based teaching method is more effective than thetraditional PPP (presentation, practice, and product) teaching method to improve businessEnglish listening & speaking abilities of students; (2) task-based teaching method canstimulate students’interest in learning and enhance their English learning confidence. Inorder to prove the two hypotheses, the author conducted a teaching experiment. Theexperimental period is one semester. The subjects are 60 students of the two classes majoringin business English in Shandong International University. Before the experiment, students ofthe two classes took a pretest about listening & speaking skills and the scores showed that their business listening & speaking abilities were at the same level. So the two classes werearranged as the control group and the experimental group respectively with 30 students foreach group. In the whole semester, the control group was taught with the traditional teachingmethod, while the experimental group was taught with the task-based teaching method. Theresearch methods include pretest, posttest, and questionnaires. The forms of the two tests arethe same and the difficulty of the two tests is kept similar to the largest degree. The authoruses the SPSS software to analyze the data from pretest, posttest and questionnaires. Throughthe quantitative analyses of the two tests’results, the author concludes: task-based teachingmethod is more effective to improve the students’listening & speaking abilities thantraditional teaching method. Through the analyses of the questionnaires, the author finds thattask-based teaching method can stimulate the enthusiasm of students and increase theirconfidence in listening & speaking English. Based on the experimental results, the authorshows a summary finally. |
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