The Application Of The Task-based English Reading Teaching Method In Beishi Senior Middle School

It’s an indisputable fact that the English college entrance examinationdepends on the reading scores. So how to improve students’ readingcomprehension becomes the most important in high school teaching.Meanwhile, the National Curriculum Standards requires English teachingshould be based on students’ interest, experience and cognition, advocating alearning style of experience, practice, participation and communication as wellas the task-based teaching method. Students can finish the task as well asexperience success. Therefore, more and more teachers do research about thetask-based reading teaching and many students benefit from it.The author has always been teaching in a remote high school, where thestudents’ quality is poor. They have no interest in reading, no good learninghabit, no self-learning ability. They can not focus their attention on whatteachers teach. But they also have curiosity, are willing to interact andcooperate with others like all the other school students. What’s more, the coreof the task-based teaching method is that students are the first priority, which isjust suitable for students’ characteristics and learning orientation. Incombination with the schools’ reality, the paper is aimed at applying thetask-based teaching method to reading teaching to improve students’ readingcomprehension. And it can offer reference for the other teachers.The paper expounds the implementation of the task-based teachingmethod and the principles systematically on the base of the literature review.The researcher did a research on how to develop and improve the students’reading comprehension from three aspects: pre-reading task, aiming atstimulating students’ reading interest; while-reading task, focusing oncultivating students’ reading comprehension; post-reading task, aiming atcultivating students’ ability to output and to deal with practical problems.Furthermore, the researcher checked the students’ interest and attitude towards English reading through questionnaires in Class3before and after theexperiment. During the experiment, the researcher applied the task-basedteaching method to Class3, and the students discussed and finished tasks ingroups. But for Class4, the researcher still adopted the traditional method.Before the experiment, the pre-test on reading was carried out in both classes tocheck the English level, and the mean scores were17.74and18.09. With theIndependent Samples Test, it is easy to find that the two-tailed probability (.794)is much higher than0.05(0.05was chosen to be the significance level). So thedifference of the two classes was not significant. After the experiment, thepost-test was carried out at the same time in the two classes, too. With the helpof SPSS, it is easy to draw a conclusion that the mean scores were18.71and23.26, furthermore, the two-tailed probability (.002＜0.05), which meant thatthe difference between the two classes were significant. The result of theresearch shows that the task-based reading teaching method can cultivatestudents’ reading interest and change their attitude, then improve studentsreading comprehension. So the task-based teaching method can solve thereading problem in Beishi Senior middle school.The paper is composed of five chapters. First, the author narrates thesignificance and background of the study. Then the author discusses therelationship between reading teaching and the task-based teaching method,working out the reading teaching goals and the principles of task designing onbase of the author’s students. With the aid of SPSS and questionnaires, theauthor collects and analyzes the data before and after the experiment, whichproves that the task-based teaching method can improve students readingcomprehension and change their attitudes towards reading, thus raise theirreading interest. Finally, the author gets some reflection based on the findingsduring the experiment and offers suggestions for the other teachers.