A Comparative Study On Task-based And Presentation-Practice-Production Approaches In English-spoken Teaching For Higher Vocational College

The current college English education advocates the cultivation of practical ability.Oral English is the most direct indicator of English ability.How to improve the effectiveness of oral English teaching is a difficult task in college English teaching.At present,the presentation-practice-produce(PPP)teaching method and task-based teaching method are widely used English teaching methods in China.The PPP teaching method is the product of communicative language teaching mode,with stress on structure-function-communication.It is convenient for teachers to organize and control the classroom,and it also conforms to Chinese students' study habits.Task-based teaching method considers that learning is the process of meeting individual internal needs,with focus on the initiative of learners and the situational teaching.It has become more and more popular and has a tendency to take the place of PPP teaching.However,task-based teaching method has a higher requirement on students' language proficiency and learning enthusiasm.Whether task-based teaching is suitable for non-English majors in higher vocational colleges? What are the effects of these two teaching methods in oral English teaching for vocational students? A16-week teaching experiment was carried out to compare PPP teaching with task-based teaching on oral English.The teaching experiment was carried out in two natural classes.Every class consisted of one high proficiency group and one low proficiency group.Every group consisted of 15 students,60 students in total.Two classes are taught by the same English teacher in the same language project using two different teaching methods.After each teaching project was completed,all participants were given an oral test.In total,every participant took part in one pre-test and four post-tests.All the results were graded by three other college English teachers based on the same criteria.The average score was analyzed as the final score.SPSS19.0 was used to analyze the experimental data and the results showed that English teaching method has different effects on students with different language proficiency.For low-proficiency students,PPP teaching is better than Task-based teaching while for high-proficiency students,task-based teaching is better than PPP teaching.The experiment affects students' oral ability in two aspects: 1)In terms of languageknowledge,PPP is more helpful to improve Accuracy and Variety of vocabulary and grammar than task-based teaching for low-proficiency students.For high-proficiency students,task-based teaching can better improve Accuracy and Variety of vocabulary and grammar than PPP teaching.2)In terms of language skills,PPP teaching is more helpful than task-based teaching in improving oral Fluency,but not in Pronunciation and Appropriateness,for low-proficiency students.For high-proficiency students,Task-based teaching can improve their Fluency and Appropriateness of 'oral express,but it has no effect on Pronunciation.Therefore,different teaching methods should be adopted for students with different language proficiency.Moreover,the improvement of oral pronunciation of non-English major students in higher vocational colleges is still a big difficulty and requires effective guidance from teachers.A weak form of task-based teaching,where teachers instruct students to collect more language information of the coming task,is a better teaching method for high vocational students.Also,teachers should pay more attention on the language review after the task,which can help the students to enforce what they have learned during the task.Based on these finding,we offer some suggestions for future teaching and researches.