An Action Research On The Application Of TBLT To College Students’ Oral English Teaching

With China’s gradual integration into the world, the frequent economic exchangeand the settlement of various foreign enterprises, oral English is particularly important.However, it seems that the learners’ communicative ability still fall behind, though theyhave learned English for many years. The aim of teaching English is mainly to cultivatethe learners’ communicative ability. The New English Curriculum (2007) by China’sMinistry of Education proposes that this ability should be fostered in the teachingprocess.“Task-based” language teaching (TBLT) emphasizes “learning by doing”,which refers to learn language by performing specific task activities. The main objectiveof English teaching is to cultivate students’ ability in comprehension and usage oflanguage. Based on the theory of TBLT, this action research tries to find an efficientway to improve the college students’ oral English level.An action research on TBLT training was carried out among36first-year CivilEngineering majors in Yangtze University. To discover the reasons why most studentshave low oral English proficiency, take no initiative in participating in classroomactivities and lack interest in using English, the author first made some hypotheses, andthen tested those hypotheses through preliminary questionnaire, interview and pretestamong the students in September2013. Based on the analysis of the36validquestionnaire interview and oral test results, the author put her TBLT training projectinto effect. The training lasted for three months from September to December in2013.Post-questionnaire, post-interview and posttest were carried out at the end of theexperiment to find out whether the students made any progress after applying TBLT inteaching based on the comparison between the data before and after the experiment.This thesis aims to study three questions:1.Whether task-based approach canimprove students’ interest in learning English and foster students’ positive attitudetowards oral English?2. Whether task-based teaching approach is superior to traditionalapproach, and whether it is more effective in improving students’ oral English?3. Whether Task-based approach is to make the students more actively participate inoral English teaching?Based upon experiment of TBLT, we can get that TBLT is more effective than thetraditional PPP method in improving students’ oral English. From the questionnairesand the interviews’ analysis, we can see that task-based teaching approach can arousestudents’ interest and foster students’ positive attitude towards oral English.The author hopes that this research can provide some help to other teachers whoare interested in conducting this type of research.