An Empirical Study On The Application Of Task-based Language Teaching To The Instruction Of College English Writing

Writing, as a productive or creative skill of one's language competence, plays an indispensable part in language communication. On one hand, writing is a real-life reality, through which we communicate and maintain social relationship. On the other hand, writing in classroom teaching is often seen as a means to consolidate language that students have studied recently. Moreover, College English Curriculum Requirements (2007) explicitly indicates the teaching aims of college English:" develop students' comprehensive ability in language use, especially in both speaking and writing". Therefore, linguistic scholars and teachers in China and abroad have done a large number of researches with the purpose of improving the effect of teaching writing.Traditionally, English writing is taught by product-orientation method, which focuses on the accuracy of the final product. This teaching method has made contributions to students' accurate language reserve, which is the basis of a good composition. However, the effect of English writing teaching is still not obvious. Writing is still the weak point in second language teaching, and the majority of students view English writing as a tough job. Hence, an effective teaching method in English writing is called for.College English Curriculum Requirements (2007) also points out the necessities of changing the teaching aims and teaching model of college English -- changing from purely linguistic knowledge teaching to an emphasis on both the linguistic knowledge and language applicable ability; changing from the teacher-centered teaching model to the students-centered teaching model. This symbolizes that College English teaching has stepped into a students-centered period.Task-based language teaching advanced by India linguist N. S. Prabhu (1982) emphasizes the new teaching method of "learning by doing" and "learner-centered tasks", which is widely accepted and practised in the field of second language teaching. Moreover, it has made an obvious improvement in language skills, such as listening, speaking, translating and so on. So the paper attempts to apply task-based language teaching to English writing, with the purpose of improving students' comprehensive writing ability. In order to test the validity and feasibility of applying task-based language teaching to college English writing teaching, an empirical research is designed and conducted in two parallel classes of non-English majors from Huashang College in Shanxi University of Finance and Economics. One is chosen as the experimental class with the task-based language teaching in English writing class while the other is chosen as the control class with the traditional product approach in English writing class. Besides, three instruments are used to test the results, including English writing proficiency tests, questionnaires and face to face interviews. The experiment lasts for a whole term, from Sept. 2010 to Dec. 2010. After the experiment, all the data from the English writing proficiency tests, questionnaires and transcription of interviews are collected and analysed. The results indicate that:1. The task-based language teaching can improve learners' writing skills, especially learners' language usage competence.2. The task-based language teaching has a positive effect on learners' interest, attitude, and self-confidence building.3. Learners are in favor of the task-based language teaching, especially task activities, group work and teacher's feedbacks. The various task activities in which students are engaged, facilitate students' writing process. Besides, the group work makes students dare to express themselves in English before their companions and learn a lot from each other. In the meantime, the group work spirits students' collectivism and cooperative learning. In the stage of teacher's assessment, the teacher pays attention to give positive and constructive feedbacks, which serves as the driving force and promotes students' comprehensive writing ability.Although the results show the positive effect of the task-based teaching method to college English writing teaching, there are still some inevitable limitations, such as the short-period of experiment and a small size of subjects. It is still hoped that the thesis can provide some useful information for further study.