On The Application Of Task-based Method In Business English Writing's Teaching

Task-based method is a popular teaching approach since the end of the 20th century. It emphasizes tasks and evaluates students by the learning process and result. Task-based method adopts analytic syllabus which is different from the traditional synthetic syllabus and proposes a bottom-to-top reflective teaching. Its teaching materials and content are decided by the teacher and students instead of the teacher and experts. So the knowledge students need to learn is in consistency with students' needs and possesses clear purpose. What's more, task-based method has solid theory foundations: Haliday's Systematic-functional linguistics is its linguistic basis;Piaget's Constructivism;Burner's Discovery learning and Ausubel's Meaningful learning constitute learning theory basis;Wang Cairen's Activity teaching forms its teaching theory basis. Therefore, as a modern teaching concept, task-based method has begun to gain more and more acceptance in language teaching field.In the current college English teaching there is a misconcept which views communicative ability refers to oral ability. In fact, communicative ability includes both oral and written communicative ability. Especially today international business transactions become more and more frequent, so business English writing naturally begins to get the important position. After graduation most of English majors will work for foreign trade companies, so they will inevitably face lots of business English writings. Then they have to know how to proficiently deal with business English writing matters so as to serve their companies well.In the past task-based method found much more practice in oral English teaching. In order to find a valid teaching method this paper aims to discuss the application of task-based method in business English writing's teaching through which task-based method gets a wide space fordevelopment and business English writing obtains better teaching result. With a view to efficiently apply task-based method to business English writing's teaching the whole teaching process can be divided into three phases: selecting tasks, performing tasks and evaluating tasks. During the period of performing tasks, task-designing rules, task-performing rules and results-sharing rules should be adhered to. And task-designing rules include authenticity rule, hyper-text rule and module rule. Task-performing rules consist of personality rule and collaboration rule. Results-sharing rules mainly refer to function rule and self-efficacy rule. To further prove the feasibility of task-based method's application in business English writing's teaching, the author made one comparative experiment in two English major classes within one year. The result shows that the class adopting task-based method is obviously higher in business English writing grades than the other class using traditional method.This paper consists of 5 chapters. Chapter One introduces the domestic and foreign study of task-based method. Chapter Two analyses the reasons for the application of task-based method in business English writing's teaching. Chapter Three presents task-based method's application rules in business English writing's teaching. Chapter Four states the specific application of task-based method in business English writing's teaching. Chapter Five gives a brief introduction to the test process and the result analysis of task-based method's application in business English writing's teaching.