The Effect Of Task-based Approach On The English Oral Proficiency Of The Vocational College Students

With more and more communication between China and the world outside, English, as an international language, plays an increasingly important role and has become one of the most important courses in the college curriculums. The ultimate goal of language teaching is to foster the students' ability to communicate with others in English effectively. But in fact, the result is not satisfactory. Most of the students cannot express themselves in English freely, and the phenomenon "dumb English" is prominent among the vocational college students. Vocational college students are a special group of students, who are different from ordinary university students. They are expected to be technical workers instead of academic ones after graduation in our country. As for English study, the Ministry of Education stresses that English teachers should teach the vocational college students essential English knowledge and train them basic skills; meanwhile, the teachers should focus more attention on fostering the students' ability of practical communication in English. That is to say, improving the students' oral language is one of the most important parts of vocational college English teaching. However, in vocational college English classroom we still employ traditional teaching approach, which is also called PPP (Presentation, Practice and Production) model. This model attaches much importance to the knowledge and neglects students' communicative ability. As a result, the English teaching is not satisfactory. So it is urgent and important for us to improve the students' oral English ability by means of a good and practical.Task-based approach is becoming a catchword in the English teaching circle. This relatively new teaching methodology was evolved from CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) and has slowly developed since 1980s, which emphasizes "learning by doing" and offers students an opportunity to make language in the classroom meaningful before memorable. Nowadays, in China, many books and articles focus on the adoption of this approach to the teaching in primary and secondary schools and universities, few of them have a systematic study of the application of the task-based approach to the teaching in vocational colleges. Under this circumstance, the author attempts to do this research to find out the effect of using TBA to improve the vocational college students' oral language and whether this approach can help to arouse more the students' interest in learning English than the traditional PPP approach.The result of the research which lasted for 20 weeks shows that task-based approach in vocational college English teaching can help to stimulate the students' interest in learning English than the traditional PPP approach. In the aspect of the students' oral language, the result shows the approach brings about striking effect in improving the size and discourse management, and flexibility and appropriateness of students' oral English proficiency; but as far as accuracy and range are concerned, it produces less effect in improving the students' oral English proficiency than the traditional PPP approach.