The Application Of Task-Based Approach To English Reading Teaching In Vocational Colleges

The strengthening of international cooperation and communication requires thatthe employees in different fields should possess the professional knowledge and goodEnglish application abilities, including the students’reading competence on Englishpassages. Reading, one of the main means of obtaining information is the foundationof other skills in language learning and has large proportion in English teaching. Theauthor found that students’reading competence in vocational colleges is poor in theteaching process. Because the English foundation of students in vocational colleges ispoor and the students lack initiative and enthusiasm in English learning, it is difficultto improve students’reading competence. English teachers focus on the imparting ofpure language knowledge and ignore the comprehensive development of students’reading skills, learning interests and attitudes, which also lead to the slowimprovement of students’reading competence.The task-based approach, which developed from the communicative approach,emphasizes on“learning by doing”. It concerns the development of the students’language competence in the process of completing tasks. Since it was introduced toChina in 1996, the task-based approach has been paid much attention to by theresearchers in foreign language teaching. The studies on the application of task-basedapproach emerge one after another. The thesis analyzes the situation of presentreading teaching in vocational colleges, points out the purpose and significance of thestudy, reviews the relevant theories on task-based approach and reading teaching, andcarries out the empirical study under the guidance of Willis’s framework of TBA. Thesubjects are 73 students majoring in accounting in Shandong AgriculturalAdministrators College in 2010. In the experimental class (36 students), task-basedapproach is adopted in the reading teaching; while in the control class (37 students),the traditional PPP approach is adopted. Through the comparison and analysis of thescores of pre-test and post-test in both classes, the study proves the task-basedapproach can arouse the interests of students and improve students’readingcompetence more effectively in comparison with the traditional PPP approach.Meanwhile, some suggestions are put forward to teachers who will carry out thetask-based approach to the reading teaching and to students who are eager to improve their English reading competence. At last, the limitations of this study are listed:lacking of English applying environment leads to the lower initiative and enthusiasmof students to learn English well; the duration of experiment is limited, which affectsthe results of the study; the samples of the experiment are random, which lacks ofgeneral significance; limited by the author’s teaching experience and knowledge level,the author has difficulties in tasks designing; In the actual experiment, the evaluationsystem is imperfect, and so on. The thesis offers a few suggestions for the furtherstudy of task-based approach according to the limitation existed in the study.