Application Of Task-based Language Teaching To Tourism Major Students’ Oral English Teaching In Vocalionai College

With fast development of the economic globalization, English as one ofthe most important communicative tool plays a more and more importantrole in the international communication. In recent years, the tourism in InnerMongolia developing rapidly, the demand of tourism graduates who are ableto communicate effectively in English is increasing. Vocational collegegraduate are required to do practice work instead of academic work in theirfuture career. Communicative ability is mainly embodied as spoken English.Thus, for the tourism students in English teaching, oral communicationteaching is an important part can not be ignored. However, present Englishlearning and teaching in China is far from satisfactory. Most vocationalcollege students regard English as a difficult task. They lose confidence inEnglish learning especially speaking English. Gradually they becomereluctant to open the mouths to speak English. Moreover, test-orientededucation in high school makes both teachers and students neglect oral skills.The teaching approach used in vocational college is still teacher-centered,vocabulary, grammar and examination-oriented based, which lead tostudents incompetent communicative skills after their graduation andcannot meet the requirements of the society and the job market.Therefore, we teachers have a responsibility to explore and reconstructthe teaching mode of Tourism students oral English in order to effectivelyimprove students’ oral proficiency.Task-based language teaching was developed from CLT(Communicative Language Teaching) and has expanded since1980s, whichstresses "learning by doing" and offers students an chance to speak Englishin the classroom. At present, in China, lots of articles and books payattention to the adoption of this approach to the teaching in secondary andprimary schools and universities, but only a few of them have a scientific research of the implementation of the task-based language teaching to thetourism students in vocational colleges. On this occasion, the author tries tofind out the effect of using TBLT to improve the vocational college tourismstudents’ oral language. In additional, this research means to find outwhether this approach can help attract the students’ more self-confidenceand interest in learning oral English than the traditional approach.This paper regards Willis’ TBLT as a theoretical foundation. It makes aresearch of the implementation of TBLT to Tourism Students Oral EnglishTeaching in Vocational Colleges. The subjects of this research are freshmenin Tourism Management major of Inner Mongolia Vocational College ofChemical Engineering. The author chooses Class as the experimental class,using TBA, and the other as the control class, adopting traditional teachingmethod. The instruments of this research consist of two oral test papers, twoquestionnaires and an interview. The process of this research is as follows:The author first conducted oral English test and questionnaire investigationon the two classes before the experiment. The major aim was to find out thestudents’ non-intelligence factors such as interests, self-confidence, attitudeand the level of oral English. The results revealed that there wasn t anysignificant difference between the two classes. On the basis of the problemsoccurred in oral English, the author taught intentionally when conductingTBLT. First, the author made an introduction of the background, clarifiedthe teaching tasks, and then distributed different tasks to different classes,required them to make a discussion and make reports, and finally made ananalyzation of the language focus and guide practice. After the experiment,the author conducted the post-test, post-questionnaire and an interview, thefindings revealed that TBLT has an active effect on students’ oral English,and TBLT is superior to the traditional teaching method. The authoranalyzed all data by SPSS13.0software.The thesis concluded as follows:1. TBLT is more effective than the traditional approach PPP inimproving tourism students oral English proficiency in Vocational College, and met the needs of the society and employers.2. TBLT can improve the tourism students’ non-intelligence factorscomposed of motivation, confidence, interest and team spirit in oral English.This research has some disadvantages, such as narrow and fewersubjects, shorter research time, which may impact the accuracy of dataanalysis. But it is assumed that the study may supply an actual description ofTBLT in tourism students oral English in vocational colleges, the authorbelieves this thesis might have some reference value to tourism students English teaching and the study of TBLT.