A Study On The Effects Of Applying Task-based Language Teaching Method To Business Oral English Teaching In Higher Vocational College

Owing to the expansion of economic cooperation in the world, business exchanges worldwide happen often in China. The talents for business English are increasingly demanded in many joint ventures and external sectors, so a large number of higher vocational colleges have offered business English course. Business people are required to possess not only the strong business-related knowledge, but also the superior English communication skills. The teaching goal of higher vocational colleges is to cultivate the graduates with practical skills to pursue the careers in the fields involving technique, production, management, service industry and so on. Therefore, English course offered by higher vocational colleges aims at English knowledge as well as the English pragmatic skills dealing with daily conversations and foreign business affairs. For that reason, business oral English teaching is attached increasingly great importance today. However, how to enhance the students'business oral proficiencies tends to be a tough job for the teachers in higher vocational colleges all the time. Teachers have always been adopting the PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) approach which produces little improvement of students'business oral English skills. Therefore, English educators have been looking for a new efficient way in business oral English teaching all the time.Task-based language teaching (TBLT) formed on the ground of ideas of constructivism, humanism and second language acquisition theory acts an important role in language teaching, which evolved from communicative language teaching. TBLT has made great achievements in China especially in higher vocational colleges, whose point can be explained as"learning by doing". TBLT regards the designed tasks as the learning motivation, considers the performances of the tasks as the learning process and views the presentation of the completed tasks instead of the testing scores as the teaching results. TBLT is intended to heighten the students'language competence and develop their learning strategies, innovative spirits and pragmatic skills, which is consistent with the training objective of higher vocational colleges. Although many scholars and educators have put forward a lot of theoretical presentations and drawn some conclusions from the teaching implementations, few of them handle the effectiveness of TBLT to business oral English teaching in higher vocational colleges. Therefore, it still requires large numbers of experiments regarding implementation of TBLT to prove its feasibility and effectiveness. .The thesis is targeted to investigate the effectiveness and feasibility of application of TBLT to business oral English teaching in a higher vocational college. It lasted four months and the subjects involved in the experiment were the students majoring in business Japanese from a higher vocational college in Hebei province, whose English learning centers on business English, mainly in business oral English. The instruments adopted in the experiment are pre-test and post-test, questionnaire in addition to the interview so as to obtain an authentic, accurate and objective experimental data. The study aims to explore (1) How can the business tasks be applied in business oral English teaching? (2) How do the students like TBLT? (3) What effects does TBLT have on business oral English teaching?After the experiment, the author handles and analyzes the results of the tests, questionnaire and interview so as to see whether there is a significant difference or not before and after the implementation of TBLT to business oral English teaching. Based on the analytical results, the author concludes that TBLT proves to be more effective especially compared with PPP approach. In the end, the author also discusses the limitations of the experiment. And the pedagogical implications and suggestions for further study are recommended at last in the thesis.