A Study On The Task-based Approach To Oral English Teaching In Colleges

Nowadays, it is highly necessary and vital for the Chinese to learn English, especially in a more open China today. The current situation of oral English teaching in college requests teachers to take active and effective approach to train students'practical communicative competence to satisfy the requirement of competitive society. In the practical teaching, there are still some shortcomings. It is very common for our students to greet each other, but after talking about the weather, they fail to express anything, to talk about a serious topic and communicate with others. The emergence of the above problems shows that there is a big disadvantage existing in our English teaching, that is, the teacher just teaches English as language structure, and the result is that students neither learn the knowledge of the language nor the ideas of the language.In the May of 2001, the new curriculum compiled by the Department of Education requested teachers should avoid the teaching approach of simply teaching language knowledge. It proposed the mode of task-based teaching and during the teaching process teachers should train students'comprehensive language abilities. It proposed the learning by means of experience, practice, participation, communication and cooperation. Task-based approach is considered effective way to shift from the teaching of discrete grammatical structures to the fostering of communicative ability.Task-based approach is becoming a catchword in the English teaching circles. This relatively new teaching approach was evolved from communicative language teaching and slowly emerged since the 1980s, which emphasizes"learning by doing"and offers students an opportunity to make language in the classroom meaningful. Students can enhance their oral English through communicative activities designed in the authentic, free, and harmonious environments.The results indicate that students could make progress of the language skills, the results also show that students make relatively significant improvement in terms of other skills and abilities such as communicative competence, thinking ability, cooperation with others, culture awareness, computer skills, skills for speech and the abilities to obtain information etc. In addition, this study learns that most of students can accept this approach, even some of them show great interest in task-based approach.