An Experimental Study Of Task-based Approach To Teaching Of The Vocational College EFL Writing

The teaching of EFL writing has been under the influence of the'product approach', the'process approach'and'genre approach'. With the development of linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, more and more studies have shown that the absolute separation of these approaches is undesirable. In order to better improve learners'writing competence, some scholars have proposed to apply the task-based approach to the teaching of EFL writing due to the fact that this approach is underpinned by task-based learning (TBL), which combines the insights from communicative language teaching with a systematic focus on language form. Drawing on Jane Willis'methodological framework (1996), the extensive worked-out one for TBL, this paper examines its effects on the improvement of EFL learners'writing competence when such a framework is applied to the vocational college writing classroom in Chinese settings, and thus tentatively explores the effectiveness of the task-based approach to the teaching of EFL writing.Results of this study are derived from discussion concerned with data from two questionnaires and scores of the college entrance test, the pretest and the posttest yielded from an experiment designed for this research, and reveal that the application of Willis'framework for TBL to Chinese writing classrooms will have some positive influences upon vocational college EFL learners'understanding of a good piece of English writing, greatly help them to solve some problems related to composing, and thereby improve their writing competence. Although such aspects as task complexity, task difficulty and task production leave unmentioned, this study attempts to provide the teaching of EFL writing or even the discipline of teaching writing a feasible and effective approach and calls for researches in a more specific area in terms of this issue to provide more data and insights.