TBLT In English Reading Teaching Of College Art Majors Under Implicit Grading

This thesis aims to probe into English reading teaching of art majors who are admitted tocolleges depend on their tests of specialized courses and literacy courses. That makes art majorsdistinct from other candidates to some extent. The existing problems in English classes of artmajors are: Firstly, the activities that teachers propose in the classes receive quite few responses,and that leads directly to the inferior class effectiveness. Secondly, the traditional teachinginstruction focuses more on the knowledge points to practice language form and language skills,but relatively ignores the individual differences and students’ personal experience. However, artmajors are endowed with special advantages: For instance, they are inclined to pursue moreindependent personalities and embrace more challenges. Besides, they are better atcommunicating and expressing themselves due to the particularity of their majors. Furthermore,they are equipped with huge potential to learn new things. In consideration of the findingsmentioned above, the feasibility and effectiveness of Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) inreading of art majors under implicit grading was studied in the author’s teaching process.This thesis attempts to carry out TBLT after implicit grading in English reading teachingamong art majors. First, the author grade the students in EC into3levels according to theircollege entrance examination record, then design tasks on the basis of the grading resultimplicitly, so that the disadvantages of explicit grading are avoided. After that, the teacher shouldset up teaching goals and put forward specific requirements to promise that the students play thecentral role in learning activities to improve language competence. That is to say, two teachinginstructions are combined together in this teaching experiment. Students are groupedscientifically and implicitly, and then teachers arrange seats, assign tasks and evaluate students’achievement on the basis of the grouping result.Two research questions are raised in this thesis:1. Which approach will effectively improve college art majors’ reading proficiency, TBLTunder implicit grading teaching or the traditional teaching instruction.2. Which approach will effectively inspire art students’ interest of English learning, TBLTunder implicit grading teaching or the traditional teaching instruction. The experiment mentioned in this thesis was implemented in Shandong University of Artsfor16weeks in2012. The subjects were the Design majors from two parallel classes. TBLTunder implicit teaching was employed in the EC, in which class the students are graded into threelevels, then arranged seats and assigned tasks implicitly, while traditional teaching model wasimplemented in the CC. One questionnaire, two tests and follow-up interview were applied asinstruments in the experiment. The findings were derived from the statistical analysis by SPSS17.0and Excel2003. Finally, Conclusions were made on the basis of the combination ofquantitative research and qualitative research scientifically.Some research results are shown as follows: First, TBLT under implicit grading is moreeffective than the traditional teaching instruction to promote students’ reading proficiency.Second, TBLT under implicit grading plays important role in cultivating students’ interests inEnglish reading. It can be concluded that TBLT under implicit teaching is feasible and effectivein practice and is valuable to be advocated further. However, due to the restrictions of theconditions, it must be admitted that there are still some limitations that can’t be neglected in theprocess of implementing this teaching experiment and remains to be further improved studied byother researchers.