An Experimental Study On Constructing The Model Of Task-based Teaching And Learning In SEFC Reading

Reading is one of the important ways for people to get information, to obtain knowledge, to take pleasure and to communicate. Hence, reading draws more and more academic concerns of TEFL/TESL both at home and abroad for a long time and great attention is being paid to the study on the models of how to teach reading.However, the situation of students' reading performance and reading comprehension isn't satisfactory. Statistics of investigations show that students' reading competence is influenced by the integrating factors of their reading habits, their background knowledge, their learning styles and the teaching environment.Fortunately, the English Curriculum Criteria is being carried out throughout China, and it advocates the approach of task-based teaching and learning, which would completely change the instructional situation in which students learn knowledge passively. But how to employ the model in teaching English, especially in teaching English reading, is a theme worth exploring.This thesis made a study on constructing the model of task-based teaching and learning in SEFC reading from five aspects: task components and the integration of the factors, task procedure, reading skills, task assessment, and reading principles.Based on the theories of authentic scholars and experts, and drawing on the results of former researchers, we concluded two hypotheses logically:(1) Task-based model of teaching and learning can facilitate SEFC students' competence of reading;(2) Task-based model of teaching and learning can change SEFC students' learning styles from passive reception to self-access, co-operation and exploration.In order to verify the hypotheses from theories, we have done an experiment with 100 students from Senior One, who were divided into the experimental class and the control class. During the experiment, the model of task-based teaching and learning was employed for reading in the experimental class, whereas the traditional method was applied for reading in the control class. Meanwhile, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used in the study, and the data was processed by SPSS (11.0) with values of means, standard deviations, t-tests and two-tail significances as comparative reference.The analysis of the data shows the students in the experimental class did better inreading comprehension and the result of the questionnaire investigation and the observation from the teacher prove that the students in the experimental class changed more in their learning styles from passive reception to self-access, co-operation, and exploration.Therefore, the experiment has proved that the hypotheses are true, which indicates that the model of task-based teaching and learning is efficient in SEFC reading.There are five sections in this thesis. Section One gives a general statement of the problems in reading and presents the purposes and significance of the study; Section Two discusses the different reading contexts and the relations between them; Section Three deals with the literature review, from long shot to short shot, from theories to practice and from reading to task-based teaching and learning, and then to the construction of the model of task-based reading in classrooms, and some definitions of key terms are presented at the beginning of this section; Section Four is a presentation of the design of the experiment, which is the key part of the study; and the thesis ends with the conclusion, Section Five, in which some limitations and implications are put forward. Such is the structure of the thesis.