A Study Of The Task-Based Approach To English Writing At College

Nowadays English bridges China with the world, as it is seen as one of the most important mediums of communication in the world. Therefore, in China a good command of English is put in a more important position, especially after China entered WTO. English writing, as one of productive skills, is a mirror of the integrated skills in mastery of good English. Writing is one of the communicative activities that exchange the information in the language. The students' linguistic, cognitive and affective competences have been improved along with writing proficiency prompted. However, Students at college are making complaints of low motivation in a boring writing class, less chance to express their own ideas, at loss when doing some writing assignments, and even their little progress in English writing skill while employers are complaining of the graduate employees' less communicative competence in written English in the real world. Many reasons resulted in the problems at college, and writing teaching method should not escape being questioned. Product-based writing method, which was always used in the tradition, puts more importance on the writing work students produce; process-based writing method puts more importance on the monotonous process of writing; genre-based writing model puts more emphasis on genres that are given to students to imitate and students are considered as passive receivers. These methods don't prepare students to actively and confidently write as writers with an integrated skill in or out of class, let alone they individually write about what will be needed to exchange in the real life.In the last century, linguists and teaching practitioners have put themselves into the research on English teaching methods, hoping to discover a better model to solve the problems in pedagogy. Since the 1980s when task-based approach was proposed and experimented in the classroom of Indian, the approach has been a focus, which emphasizes learner-centered, cooperative learning and dynamic task-based activities, describing natural acquisition of a language for communication in class (Littlewood 1992; Nunan 1989). The approach has been discussed and researched on. In 2001 it was...