Application Of TBLT To English Reading Teaching In Vocational College

Reading is one of the effective ways to gain knowledge and perfect one’s personal development. Students’ reading competence will directly affect their ability to acquire information and their communicative competence. Promoting learners’ reading competence is one of the teaching goals set in the new National English Curriculum. However, current English reading teaching in most of the vocational college tends to focus on the explanation of words and sentences and emphasize the analysis of grammar items. This traditional teacher-centered teaching mode, to some extent, has some misunderstandings about English reading teaching. Some teachers tend to teach English reading teaching either in a translation teaching class model or in an extensive reading teaching model; while others give too much time for students to read just by themselves and the whole class do everything freely, as a result of which, some of the students just idle the time away without doing anything. Some teachers who misunderstand the core of the TBLT tend to teach the class in an ask-and-answer pattern, which ignore the students’central position in English learning. The traditional teaching fails to activate students’learning interests.So far a lot of teaching mode has been put forward to improve learners’ reading competence. TBLT is one of them, which is considered to be the effective way because learners can learn something in a problem-solving way. They can learn by doing personally and improve their language proficiency through practice, interaction, communication and cooperation. It makes learners’ learning process as a process of cultivating learners’learning interests, improving their comprehensive language skill and building up their communicative competence. Their reading competence has also been greatly promoted through TBLT reading mode.This paper intends to probe the efficiency and feasibility of TBLT in English reading teaching in vocational college. The author randomly selected two non-English major classes to carry out an18-week empirical study. One hundred freshmen of the Chengde Nursing Vocational College took part in the experiment. Each group has50students who major in nursing (the patients). The Excel software is used to analyze the data which is collected through pre-test, post-test, pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire. The result of the experiment shows that TBLT can help the students to improve their English reading ability as well as their communicative competence. At the same time the learners’ learning interests has also been enhanced.