Application Of Task-Based Approach In College English Vocabulary Learning And Teaching

In the past decades, the reform of English education has obtained more and more concerns. Vocabulary, as the basic unit of a language, is considered by many linguists and language educationists the center of language education; and regarded by students as the most difficult but important problem in learning a language. However, the students have formed a habit of memorizing vocabulary in a repeated mechanic way. The result is unsatisfactory in spite of the long time and energy they spend. They feel at a loss especially when they are faced with the problem in a real communication,. Even those college students, who have more than six years'experience in learning English, still feel confused about how to learn vocabulary. Most of them complain about their small size of vocabulary and their lack of ability to use the language in real communication.In order to enlarge the students'vocabulary size and improve their communicative ability, the author, on the basis of many theories in this field and her own experience, concludes that Task-based Approach (TBA) is an effective way.TBA is the development of communicative teaching method. It originates from Prabhu's Banglore Project, which put the teaching aim into activities. TBA put an emphasis on"learning by doing"and is quite popular in China at present.A"task"is an activity with specific objective in teaching process. And during the activity, the learners understand each other, use, create and communicate in the target language.In order to prove whether TBA is effective in college English vocabulary learning and teaching (VLT), the author conducted an experiment in two classes, one is the experimental group under TBA, and the other is the control group under traditional teaching. Two semesters later, by dealing with the data from the tests and a questionnaire in t-test, the author finds that there is a distinctive difference between the two groups– the experimental group overpasses the control group in the tests of vocabulary size and English proficiency. During the research, the author adopted qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. The response to the questionnaire reflects that most students have accepted TBA and experienced the merits of it, such as: they become interested in English class; they can...