An Empirical Study Of The Integration Of Task-based And PPP Approaches In College English Classroom Teaching

In recent years, college English teaching reform has been carried out widely in China. The reform has required that the traditional college English teaching methods should be changed. The traditional teaching methods emphasize language form but ignore language use. As a result, many college graduates can not use English to communicate with others in their practical work. In order to change this unpleasant phenomenon, many new teaching methods have been advocated, one of which is task-based language teaching (TBLT). TBLT originated from western countries in the 1980s and now it has been widely advocated in English classroom teaching in China. TBLT emphasizes"learning by doing", and helps to develop learners'communicative ability.However, according to the author's own experience in teaching practice and attendance in other teachers'classes, the author finds that the traditional PPP approach is still widely used in English classroom teaching at Taiyuan Institute of Technology. What's more, most students can not adapt themselves to TBLT. For most students, the main purpose of learning English is not to use it in the real world but to pass examinations, such as CET-4 and CET-6. And it is just the PPP approach that can help them to achieve this goal. What's more, whether TBLT, as an exotic approach, can be completely applicable to Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom is still a question.In order to seek a more appropriate teaching approach for both teachers and students at Taiyuan Institute of Technology (TIT), the author conducted an empirical study on the feasibility of integrating 3Ps approach with task-based approach in college English classroom teaching. The thesis aims at helping English teachers at TIT to find a better and more appropriate teaching approach, which can help the students develop communicative competence, but not ignore linguistic competence.In order to make the experiment purposeful, the author first presented three hypotheses:1) The integrated approach is more appropriate for both teachers and students at Taiyuan Institute of Technology. 2) The integrated approach is more effective to improve the students'integrated skills of English. 3) The integrated approach is better at enlivening classroom atmosphere, promoting class interaction, arousing the students'learning interests, promoting their emotions and self-confidence, improving their learning strategies, developing their autonomic learning ability, and strengthening their cultural awareness.And then the author used instruments, such as test, interview, and observation, to verify the above three hypotheses. Before the experiment, the author took the academic records of two groups in the final exam in July, 2010 to see whether there was any difference in their English proficiency. The author also conducted a pre-interview to know the students'learning interests and emotions, strategies and cultural awareness of two groups. The experiment lasted one semester. The subjects consisted of 76 students from two classes of Grade Two: Class 1 is the experimental group and Class 2 is the control group. Two different teaching methods were used to the two groups. The control group received the traditional PPP approach while the experimental group was taught by the same teacher in regular classes using the integrated approach. At the end of the experiment, post-test was carried out to verify the first two hypotheses, and post-interview to verify the second hypothesis.From the empirical experiment, the author came to the conclusion that integrated approach is really more appropriate for both teachers and students of Taiyuan Institute of Technology because it can develop not only the students'communicative competence but also their linguistic competence. What's more, the integrated approach can improve the students'learning strategies and developing their autonomous learning ability.