Application Of TBLT Approach To English Speaking Class In Vocational College

The TBLT approach, as a new teaching method, which is widely used in many countries It is considered as the most advanced and efficient nowadays. Although TBLT has been developed for nearly 20 years and it also has been experimented by some Chinese teachers and educators for several years, it is still a new notion in China. Meanwhile, it is a fact that a great number of Chinese students still cannot express themselves orally in English fluently even they have already learned English about 10 years. Improving students'speaking ability in English and how to improve it efficiently has become a significant mission for English teachers in China. By analyzing the definition, components and theoretical basis of the TBLT, the study tries to present the application of TBLT to English speaking teaching in vocational college.China's New English Curriculum Standard stipulates:"Advocating Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) approach to develop students'comprehensive abilities of using language…". TBLT, a branch of communicative language teaching, was put forward in the 1980s by language teaching researchers who attempted to apply the theories of language use to actual language teaching. TBLT advocates that the teachers should provide a series of communicative tasks for the learner while the learners should communicate, cooperate, interact and negotiate with other learners to complete the assigned communicative tasks with certain goals, so that the learners'communicative competence and the ability of solving problems can be fostered and be developed. At the same time, the Chinese students have not been good at speaking for years. Speaking is an activity requiring the integration of many subsystems and all these factors combine to make speaking a second or foreign language a formidable task for language learners. Therefore, it is very important to conduct research on the applying of TBLT in EFL speaking class. This study takes 20 English teaches and 60 non-English major students from Shi Jiazhuang Information Engineering Vocational College as subjects. The test which is conducted according to"Spoken English language testing and teaching"written by Wen Qiufang and the questionnaires both for teachers and students are used as instruments to collect quantitative data. The questionnaire for teachers are designed to elicit responses in four parts: teachers'understanding about TBLT, the application of TBLT, teachers'opinions about TBLT, the expectation about TBLT. The questionnaire for students, which adapted from"The research for current situation of reformation and developing strategies to the foreign language in Chinese colleges"(Liu Runqing & Dai Maichun, 2003), consists of two parts. Part A presents the students'opinions about English studying, parts B shows the degree the students report their beliefs and problems in the English studying. The collected data for the questionnaires of students and teachers are separately analyzed with SPSS13.0 using descriptive statistics, person correlation analysis test and Independent-samples-t tests. Results illustrate both teachers and students held positive attitude about applying of TBLT. Also they made sure that both of them benefited a lot from this kind of teaching method. According to the results of Pearson correlation data, there is no correlation between students'learning styles and their spoken English test scores.Further discussions are followed behind the conclusion. Suggestions are proposed to develop the abilities of both teachers, students and change the way of test-system. Teachers should learn to change their roles on class; students also need to develop their independent thinking abilities. Last but not least, an proper assessment of oral language should be presented to test the real abilities of the students.