Task Authenticity:Teaching Oral English To Chinese College Students

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) has been widely employed in language teaching of many countries since its advent in the1980s. For decades, a multitude of works have been published to cover a variety of aspects in TBLT. Oral English classes in Chinese colleges have benefited greatly from these works. However, few works touched on topics used in TBLT----materials adopted in the task phase of the TBLT approach. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the importance of topics in the task phase of the TBLT approach.The preset research aimed at exploring whether the TBLT approach, with the integration of topics of novelty, campus-relatedness, familiarity and improvisation, is more effective than the PPP approach in improving Chinese college students’oral English proficiency. And the whole research covered five steps. At Step1, a one-week pre-interview was given to66students of various majors about the characteristics of their English classes in order to find some inspiration for the design of the teaching experiment coming later. At Step2, an oral English pretest was given to two classes in order to ensure the selection of two classes of students of similar proficiency levels as subjects for the teaching experiment. At Step3, a four-week teaching experiment was conducted in the two classes with different approaches (TBLT and PPP). At Step4, an oral English posttest was given to the two classes to examine the difference of the two different teaching approaches upon the subjects’oral English development. At Step5, a post-interview was administered on students of the Experimental Class in order to obtain their viewpoints on the features of the topics designed by their teacher.Results of this empirical research showed that the TBLT approach was more effective than the PPP approach so far as oral English teaching was concerned. The TBLT approach could help Chinese college students much better in improving their oral English proficiency as a whole and in upgrading their phonology, grammar, fluency and logic respectively. A second discovery from the results was that the topics with the four features of novelty, campus-relatedness, familiarity and improvisation outperformed those topics with none or only some of these four features in teaching oral English to Chinese college students.