Application Of Task-based Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Vocational School

Being one basic element of language, vocabulary has attracted profound attention in foreign language teaching. Nevertheless, a few problems were detected by the author in her own teaching experiences. For one thing, the majority of students solely employ rote memory in vocabulary acquisition. Such mechanical learning turns out to be time-consuming and ineffective. For another thing, there is a general trend of overemphasizing on word meaning but overlooking other aspects of word in vocabulary learning and teaching. Knowing the’English word-Chinese equivalent’ has been equaled to the whole thing of knowing a word. Less time were allotted to the teaching of collocation, register restriction, syntactic properties, and extended meanings, etc. As a result, the students are incapable of using the words that they can recognize in real communication. Intending to solve the existing problems, the author adopted the task-based approach to vocabulary instruction into her class in a vocational college.Task-based language teaching is a teaching approach that arranges teaching on the basis of task.’Task’refers to an activity which requires the learners to achieve some communicative outcome through using target language. TBLT is student-centered. It advocates’learning through doing’in the belief that language acquisition is not achieved by transmitting linguistic knowledge from the teacher to students or by merely training language skills, rather it is achieved by involving students in communicative activities where they get all-rounded access to the target language by themselves. The students then construct their understanding of the linguistic system of the target language step by step and finally gain a command of it. Theoretically speaking, TBLT offers language learners many facilitative conditions for acquiring vocabulary, such as authentic context, abundant input, repetition and output of target words, as well as meaning negotiations that occur among peer learners. Meanwhile, the deep processing of target words during task completion would lead to long-term retention. In addition, TBLT would aid the acquisition of both words meaning and other aspects of lexical knowledge with focuses on both meaning and form.In an effort to probe into the effectiveness of task-based approach to vocabulary teaching, a four-month quasi-experiment was conducted in two parallel classes in the vocational college. Task-based vocabulary instruction (TBVI) was adopted in the experimental class and traditional PPP (Presentation, Practice, and Production) approach was employed in the control class. The research questions of the current study is:"Which teaching approach is more effective in enlarging students’ vocabulary size and promoting students’depth of vocabulary knowledge:TBLT or PPP?". Qualitative (tests) and quantitative (questionnaire) research methods were combined in the study. Independent samples t-test was used to analyze the statistical data collected form various tests.The study reveals that the students in experimental class outperformed their counterparts in the control class in the tests of vocabulary size, depth of vocabulary knowledge and overall English proficiency as well. According to the questionnaire, task-based language teaching was welcomed by the majority of students. Numerous students revealed that they favor experiential learning and dislikes being passive learners all the time. Therefore, they are fond of learning English now.Obviously, TBLT plays a positive role on vocabulary teaching in vocational school. Nevertheless, we should at the same time face the problems emerged during the experiment. Some practical solutions to the problems were suggested for better implementation of TBVI in the future. At last, further investigation is needed to make up the shortcomings such as small sample size and short duration in the present study.