Task-based Method In Subject-based English Teaching

Nowadays, more and more importance is attached to SBE (subject-based English) in China, while its teaching practice is not so satisfactory that SBE does not play the role it is supposed to do. The traditional teaching method conceals the characteristics of SBE-practicality, and arouses the students' dislike to it. Faced this situation, this study tried the task-based method in SBE teaching in Chinese context in order to check whether the method was suitable or not, and to see the students' attitudes to the method.First of all, this study investigated the theoretical base of this method. Based on the theory, a 15-week experiment was carried out. Seventy-eight juniors, whose major was electronics, participated in the experiment. What's more, both the subject teacher and the English teacher adopted cooperative teaching method in this experiment. Both of them prepared the lesson, designed the tasks and evaluated the students' completion of each task. This study adopted such tasks as the information-gap task, the problem-solving task, and the project work task, which were carried out in class or out of class. This study, through the questionnaires and interviews, learned about how the students completed the tasks, what attitudes they took to the task-based method and what they gained from this method. Finally, this study got some results after the analysis of these data in a qualitative and quantitative way.The results indicate that in terms of the language skills, the students could make progress more or less. The results also show that the students make relatively significant improvement in terms of other skills and abilities such as computer skills, skills for speech, the abilities to obtain information, and to cooperate with others, etc. This study, in addition, learns that most of the students can accept this method; even some of them show great interest in the task-based method.