The Feasibility Study On Task-based Teaching Approach In Improving Students’ English Reading Ability In Ethnic School

English reading is the most important way for learners to get language input. Itnot only builds the foundation for other skills like listening, speaking and reading, butalso provides sufficient linguistic input in order to help learners obtain all kinds ofinformation at this age of knowledge explosion. In consideration of the importance ofEnglish reading, The New National English Curriculum Standard points out thatEnglish teaching should strengthen the training of reading ability and that by doing it,students should be able to grasp the main idea and purpose of the reading materials bylogical expressing. According to the results of the questionnaires, and the survey onthe losing points in reading comprehension in English Senior School EntranceExamination in Xining for nearly three years, we find that English reading ability ofstudents in junior high school were still very weak, especially in Huizu middle schoolin Xining.It is in an ethnic district where the various aspects on education resources arerelatively poor. The author combined the current students’ English reading problemsand the deficiency of the present reading teaching method, put forward to using thetask-based teaching method in English reading teaching in Grade Nine. However, howto advocate task-based method in English reading teaching under the guidance ofthe theoretical basis and implementation framework of TBLT, especially in the ethnicschool English reading teaching, or if task-based teaching method is applicable or not,it is still an unsolved problem, and it is also the author’s research direction andpurpose.Tasked-based teaching method，which was developed in1980s，is a branch ofcommunicative teaching approach．Using this method，teachers can design specifictasks and can do tasks according to certain communicative language items. It hastransformed the basic concept of language use into practical classroom teachingmethod, namely “learning by doing”.At present, task-based language teaching(TBLT)has aroused more and moreattention，and The New National English Curriculum Standard also advocates the use of TBLT. However, because of the lack of target language environment, studentscan only regard English as a foreign language instead of second language to learn,there are still many inadaptions and misunderstanding on the application of task-basedteaching in our English classes. In this kind of situation, this paper focuses onapplicability problems of task-based English teaching in ethnic middle schools, whichis aimed to establish the localization of English task-based reading teaching mode.There are six chapters. Chapter one is background information, significance, andstructure of the paper. Chapter two and Chapter three review literature on task-basedapproach and reading separately. Chapter four introduces experiment. A12-weekexperimental study was conducted in Xining Huizu Middle school. Two parallelclasses were chosen as a control class and an experimental class. They have the sameteacher, the same tests, and the same class length but different reading teachingapproaches. In the former class, all the students were taught by traditional PPPapproach once a week while in the latter class students were taught by task-basedapproach. Students in these two classes had the same questionnaires and reading testsbefore and after the study. The questionnaires and reading tests show that students inexperimental class improved their reading more and had more interest in reading thanthose in the control class. Chapter five collects and analyzes data. Chapter sixconcludes findings, implications, and limitations of the study.