A Feasibility Study Of Task-based Approach To Improving College EFL Learners' Writing Competence

The teaching of EFL writing has been under the influence of the 'product approach' and the 'process approach'. With the development of linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, more and more studies have shown that the absolute separation of 'process' from 'product' is undesirable. In order to meet such a requirement, some scholars have proposed the task-based approach to the teaching of EFL writing due to the fact that this approach is underpinned by task-based learning (TBL), which combines the best insights from communicative language teaching with a systematic focus on language form.Drawing on Jane Willis' methodological framework, the most extensive worked-out one for TBL, this paper examines its effects on the improvement of EFL learners' writing competence when such a framework is applied to college writing classrooms in Chinese settings, and thus tentatively explores the feasibility of the task-based approach to the teaching of EFL writing. Results of this study are derived from discussion concerned with qualitative data (pre-experiment questionnaire & post-experiment questionnaire) and quantitative data (scores of the placement test, the pretest and the posttest) yielded from a quasi-experiment designed for this research, and reveal that the application of Willis' framework for TBL to Chinese writing classrooms will have some positive influences upon college EFL learners' understanding of a good piece of English writing, greatly help them to solve some problems related to composing, and thereby significantly improve their writing competence. Although such aspects as task complexity, task difficulty and task production leave unmentioned, this study attempts to provide the teaching of EFL writing or even the discipline of teaching writing a feasible and effective approach.