Task-based Teaching Approach In Listening Comprehension Teaching At Vocational School

It is well known that listening comprehension is an important component of language ability, therefore teaching listening comprehension ought to be an important part of English teaching. However, that is not the case at vocational schools, where teachers did not pay enough attention to listening comprehension teaching until the latest Teaching Syllabus was issued in 2000. How should it be taught at vocational schools? This thesis endeavors to explore feasible and effective ways of solving the problem.The author of this thesis conducted a questionnaire to explore the problems in listening comprehension teaching and learning at some vocational schools in Wuhan. The feedback of the teachers and students reveals that an important cause of the problems is that learners lack motivation, which leads to a negative attitude towards improving their listening comprehension. The results of the questionnaire also demonstrates that during listening comprehension teaching the teachers put too much emphasis on the result but neglect the process of listening. The third cause is that there is a lack of interaction in listening comprehension teaching class. Based upon the above analysis, the author concludes that an application of the task-based approach to listening comprehension teaching will help to improve students' listening comprehension competence. According to the principles of task-based approach, the author probes into five principles of task-based listening comprehension teaching and discusses three stages of task-based listening comprehension teaching, which is the focal point of this thesis. In this part the author makes efforts to design different tasks with the same material to meet the needs of different learners.Whether a new approach is feasible and/or effective depends on the practice testing. The author elaborates how she has carried out the task-based listening...