Task-based Language Teaching Approach To Teaching Reading Skills In Senior High School

Task-based Language Teaching approach, advocated by the New National English Curriculum Standard (2001), focuses on schooling students’competence of using language and looking for necessary information, as well as cooperation with classmates, with the new concept of learning by doing, in which learners engage in naturalistic learning by experiencing as well as exploring language. Then main characteristic of TBLT is to improve the integrated skills of students; in this approach, English is taught as skills not as knowledge. Task-based language teaching represents a strong version of CLT(Communicative Language Teaching). It views "tasks as a means of enabling learners to learn a language by experiencing how it is used in communication"(Ellis,2003, p.28). Besides, according to Robinson (2001), task-based language teaching has been argued to be especially promising, given that adopting tasks as a unit of analysis has the potential to make instruction relevant to students’specific needs, and, as a result, raise their interest and motivation in language learning in a classroom setting. In a task-based class, students play the central role with plenty of chances to be engaged in activities while the teacher is more like a listener rather than a speaker.Reading is one of the basic skills of learning English and plays a very important role in language learning. However, students who have been taught in the traditional classroom approach to reading often have difficulties in reading comprehension. They don’t know how to read English texts. They tend to read word-for-word and try to understand the meaning of each word and every detail and focus on the correct answer as the end product. Besides, most language teaching in China is test-oriented. English is treated as a knowledge subject rather than a language especially in the National Matriculation English Test. So among the students in high school, the communicative ability is far from satisfactory. The researcher has taught English in a high school over ten years. During this period, the situation of English reading teaching is not perfect because most English reading classes are teacher-centered as little time is spared for the students to practice English since the aim of teaching is to inform learners about language knowledge instead of developing their language skills. Meanwhile, students depend on the teacher too much and they just listen to the teacher passively, take notes and gradually they lose interest in English reading.The author of this paper thinks that the application of TBLT is a better way to teach English reading, in which the process of English reading instruction is actually the process of students completing a series of reading tasks, which facilitate students’intake process. Meanwhile, the process of task implementation can stimulate students’interest in reading, enhance their motivation for communication, as well as motivate students to develop the ability to analyze and solve problems.For there are various tasks in TBLT, to what extent can task-based language teaching improve students’reading skills? And which tasks are obviously efficient and which ones are relatively inefficient and why? The purpose of this thesis is to answer these questions by doing experiment between an experimental class and a controlled class for four months. During this experimental period, students in the experimental class were taught English reading skills with the TBLT approach while the controlled class was taught English reading with the traditional method. The result were collected and analyzed.The results of final test illustrates that TBLT improves students reading skills, promote reading comprehension ability as well as improve their attitude to English reading.