Application Of Task-based Approach In The Teaching Of English Professional Interpreters

As the latest development of communicative approach, it aims at enabling the students to apply the language in a skillful way through accomplishing various tasks. In a task-based lesson, the teacher does not pre-determine what will be learned and the students will learn by undertaking various tasks. In the course of various tasks, the students are expected to anticipate experience, interact, communicate, and cooperate. In the way of learning by doing and doing by learning, the lesson is based around the completion of the tasks.Compared with the traditional teaching approach, the task-based language teaching is student-centered and what will be learned is determined by what happens as the students complete the task. With the stress on developing the language proficiency, the students are learning by striving for the goal-oriented tasks, and learning by doing. The teaching result can be best achieved by the performance in accomplishing the tasks.There have been a lot of discussion and research on task-based language teaching (TBLT) ever since its emergence. At present, many prestigious linguists advocate applying TBLT to English teaching, but this advanced teaching method hasn’t been widely used in universities, and has just been put into practice in some colleges. For this reason, I believe it’s meaningful to probe into how to apply TBLT into interpreting class.I conducted a one-semester experiment in two English Major Classes of the third year in Chengdu Institute of SISU. I adopted the TBLT approach and the PPP approach respectively in the two classes. The experiment was conducted by the methods of experiment, interview, questionnaire survey. Through comparing the results, I found that TBLT is more conducive to improving the learners’overall English proficiency than the traditional teaching approach. In addition, TBLT can increase the learners’interest, enhances the learning autonomy, and cultivates the learning strategies. The successful TBLT means flexible designing of Willis’ framework in China’s context and full embodiment of Constructivism, Humanism, and Communicative approach, which contribute to a suitable interpreting framework, promoting the comprehensive skills of interpreting. Of course, I also find some difficulties in putting TBLT into practice. In my paper. I will dig out the underlying causes and provide my way of solving these problems.