A Task-based Empirical Study On English Vocabulary-teaching Of Uyghur Students

Vocabulary teaching is an important part in English teaching and is the key point of improving students" ability of using language. A famous Britain linguist D.A.Wilkins hold that people can not express many things without grammar, but people can not express anything without vocabulary. Obviously, mastering necessary words is a guarantee to implement language activities. However, traditional vocabulary teaching takes too much time on grammar practicing and words remembering. And it focuses on explaining single word not connecting with all words and digesting them and less repeating the new words. So, students get used to remembering single word and neglect to develop the ability of using language. In the process of remembering words, students will feel boring and dull, and result in much time wasted with little productivity. In order to fit this situation, task-based approach emerged in the early1980s.Task-based approach takes task as kind of teaching means and transforms the fundamental ideas of language application into classroom teaching ways with practical significance. In short, task means do things with language, and students are active in the process of doing things. With the development of English teaching reform, more and more teachers and scholars begin to pay close attention to application of TBA in English teaching. Through the literatures review, author realizes TBA has certain research foundations both in abroad or at home. But, most of research focused on reading and writing, and takes Han nationality as subject. Few researches take the minorities as subject in application of English vocabulary teaching, especially Uyghur students.The paper aims at discussing which, between the traditional approach and task-based approach, one is more effective for Uyghur students to learn English vocabulary. Author takes two teaching classes in Uyghur language and culture school of NWUN as an examples, and students in that class are almost in same level of English. Experimental class uses task-based approach, and controlled class still uses traditional teaching method. After four months, all the data and information of the investigation were collected and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively by employing SPSS16.0.The findings of this research prove that the application of TBA in English teaching class can enlarge Uyghur students’ vocabulary size, which is more effective than the tradditional PPP method, and at the same time it can help arouse Uyghur students’interest of learning English and improve their using ability of English comprehensively. Apparently, TBA is more effective than the traditional approach in the aspects of building a meaningful teaching circumstance. In the end, the paper summarizes some enlightenments vocabulary teaching of task-based approach, and puts forward the shortcomings of this study.