Study On The Application Of TBI To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading has been generally described as the comprehension and interpretation of the graphic symbols. People understand those symbols with a purpose either for pleasure or for information or for learning in their daily life. As for students who learn English as a foreign language in senior high school, the purpose of reading is learning, because reading can not only make necessary language input for students, enlarge their amount of vocabulary, and improve their language level, but also bring students new knowledge, improve their recognition level, and strengthen their ability to analyze and solve problems. Based on the above views, reading teaching in China has been viewed as one of the most important subjects for a long time. However, there exist some problems in reading teaching, for example, drilling activities in reading class mainly focus on practicing language forms, then students influenced by this teaching method may think reading is simply to memorize words and learn language points, and to make sense of the grammatical structure of each sentence. The reading teaching, which encourages students to memorize vocabulary and learn language points, is isolated from context and neglects to train students' ability of discourse analysis, which is said to deviate from the purpose of people's daily reading. It will make learners merely see the wood not the whole forests. What's more, it's not favorable for students to widen their knowledge and promote the students' awareness of the culture in English speaking countries. It's of little help to improve their ability to analyze and solve problems.So far, there is no shortage of papers studying reading teaching either from a point of view of teaching or learning. Many researchers have proposed different approaches to reading teaching as Bottom-up approach, Top-down approach, Interactive approach, SQ3R (Survey/ Question /Read /Recite /Review), and TBI(Task-Based Instruction),etc. The author of this paper thinks that application of TBI is a better way to teach English reading because it can involve the students during the process of language learning, motivate students to develop their ability to analyze and solve problems. Since Task-Based Instruction strongly emphasizes 'learning by doing', the process of classroom teaching is actually the process of students completing a series of reading tasks. Therefore, Task-Based Instruction facilitates students' intake process.This thesis attempts to investigate the practicability, efficiency of TBI in reading teaching in large class through students' feedback in senior high school. The author of this paper selects 115 students of Grade 1 as experimental subjects in No. 1 High School in Huairou district, 59 are in the experimental group and the other 56 are in the control group. The experiment was finished in the summer of 2006.The writer collected the data or information through testing and questionnaire, and made quantitative analysis by SPSS10.0— a statistical software.Testing results indicate that the advantages of Task-Based Approach in reading teaching are indisputable. The process of task implementation can stimulate learners' interest in reading and enhance their motivation for communication.The questionnaire shows that most students think application of TBI to reading teaching makes learning simple and easy. Because tasks close to students' life have promoted the co-operation and communication among them. In addition, integrating reading skills and discourse analysis into tasks also has changed the monotonous ways of the traditional reading teaching and learning. However, there are indeed some short-comings in the process of performing tasks: It's hard to control because the class is very large; it's uneasy to get feedback from students because of large number of students in one class; and students are reluctant to take part in the learning activities. Such problems as how to organize group learners effectively and how to let every learner participate await for further research. Several pedagogical implications and suggestions on how to undertake Task-Based reading teaching effectively in foreign language classroom are provided in the last part of this thesis.