A Study On The Application Of Task-Based Language Teaching Approach In College English Listening Course

The ability of listening comprehension is an important part of language ability; Listening teaching is the basic step to improve the ability of language application. However, the listening teaching of college English is the weak step. The current listening teaching approach is dominated by the traditional way: tape-playing--exercise-doing---answer-checking. Such traditional English listening class is not teaching listening rather than testing listening. As a result, learners may easily lose their interests in listening as well as hinder their improvement in the listening ability under such traditional way. Therefore, it is essential to reform the traditional listening approach and stimulate the study on students'own.Task-based Language Teaching, has arisen from 1980s, is a 'learner-centered and learning by doing' language teaching approach. To put it simply, the task, which is goal---oriented and learner-centered, is a classroom activity. It is the way that students finish a series of tasks designed according to the necessity of the development by means of English dialogue, group communication and innovation between students and teacher.Combining with the characteristics of college English listening, this thesis initiates to apply TBLT to the college English listening classes and discusses the mode and design of the task of TBLT in listening class. The research questions are as follows:1) Is TBLT more conducive than traditional teaching approach to enhance students' interest in studying listening?2) Is TBLT more effective than traditional teaching approach to improve students' listening proficiency?For the sake of verifying the effectiveness of TBLT in the college English listening class, the author carries out an experiment. The participants in the experiment come from two classes, majoring in computer, which one class is assigned as experimental group and the other as control group. The textbook entitled New Horizon College English Listening --Speaking Book 2 which was published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press was used in this research. The experiment lasted a spring semester, lasted four and a half months. A comparative analysis is made before and after the experiment. The data collected from the test scores and questionnaires dealt with quantitatively and qualitatively, which answers the author's questions:1) TBLT is more conducive than traditional teaching approach to enhance students' interest in studying listening.2) TBLT is more effective than traditional teaching approach to improve students' listening proficiency.