Improving College Students’ English Reading Ability Through Task-Dased Language Teaching

As reading is one of the most important means of acquiring knowledge, reading activities and related researches are increasingly concerned. Therefore, there arises an extensive debate on approaches of teaching college English reading. Among them, task-based language teaching is accepted by many linguists and foreign language teaching practitioners. However, among so many studies abroad, few of them focus on the Chinese college English readers. At home, there is a lack of empirical studies on task-based language teaching. This paper aims to prove that college students’ reading ability can be efficiently and feasibly improved by applying task-based language teaching to the English reading.This paper analyzes the current problems of the teaching of college English reading, and proposes the task-based language teaching (TBLT), which means reading tasks are completed through a list of related tasks, group activities and interactions between teachers and students. During the task finishing process designed by the teacher, students’ reading ability can be improved through language learning and using.In order to prove that TBLT is more effective in improving students’reading ability than the traditional teaching approach, the experiment was carried out in two classes of sophomore in Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuchang Branch for a semester of14weeks. In the experiment group, the TBLT was applied while traditional teaching approach in the control group. During the experiment, reading tests, questionnaires were used to collect data before and after experiment which were analyzed statistically.The result of the experiment proves that students’reading ability is significantly improved in the experiment group and much better than that in the control group. And study shows that TBLT contributes to students’ participation in the activities, the confidence boost and development of interest in English learning. In this way, students’ reading ability can be greatly improved. The acceptance and favor to the TBLT from students can be seen from the data of the questionnaires.It is expected that the findings of the study can shed light on the designing of the college English reading teaching for other teachers.