The Application Of Task-based Language Teaching In Senior English Reading Class

At present, new curriculum reform is made in primary and secondary schools which puts forward high requirements to students reading comprehension. New National English Curriculum Standard (2001) focuses on students’competence of using language and looking for message information as well as cooperation with classmates. With the new concept of learning by doing, learners engage in naturalistic learning by experiencing as well as exploring language. However, the reading class of the senior high where I have an internship is stilled based on a teacher-centre teaching model where students are passive in the learning process and their mental activities are limited in the teacher’s design. The whole time of a class is occupied by the teacher totally and students keep silent in class. Teachers in the traditional English reading class put too much emphasis on grammar, explanation of the words, supplements of word phrases and analysis of sentence structure paragraph-by-paragraph. At the same time, students are not able to use the reading strategies according to different reading materials. Not considering the type of the material, they just read from the beginning to the end. Above all, how to use the task-based language teaching to improve the English reading class in senior high needs to be studied.This paper, based on Communicative Language Teaching Methodology and Language Acquisition Theory, attempts to combine the empirical research and the questionnaire method to validate the task-based approach to improve high school students English reading interest and reading comprehension. The experiment is tested in Baodi District First Senior High School where120students are involved in the three-month experiment. Different English reading teaching methods are used in two parallel classes. What is more, the questionnaire helps to investigate the students’ English reading and the SPSS13.0software helps analyze the experimental results and questionnaire answers, which effectively verifies the assumptions that task-based approach facilitates to improve the senior high school students in English reading comprehension. It is of great significance to improve the students’ reading interest and to cultivate students’reading initiative, enthusiasm, sense of participation and cooperation in English reading.