The Effectiveness Of Task-based Language Teaching On Alleviating College Art Major’s English Reading Anxity

Reading, as an important receptive language skill, is of great importance inEnglish learning. A good reading competence can offer Art students moreopportunities for further study and professional development. However, havingstudied English for many years, a great number of college Art students’ readingability is still far from satisfactory. This is influenced by many factors, among whichreading anxiety is considered to be an important variable. Cited as an importantemotional factor in foreign language learning, anxiety has received a wide range ofattention. Many researches have been conducted and showed that reading anxietyhave much to do with students’reading performance in the whole reading process.College art majors are quite distinct from other common college students as theyare admitted by the colleges with lower literacy scores. Nevertheless, art majors arealso endowed with their own advantages due to the particularity of their majors. Forinstance, generally speaking, they are good at communicating with others andexpressing themselves. Besides, they tend to pursue more independent personalitiesand they are willing to embrace more challenges. What’s more, art students tend to beendowed with great potential in learning new things. However, in fact, most of artstudents have got poor performance in English learning and suffered a high level ofanxiety in English reading. One of the important factors for this phenomenon is thetraditional Grammar Translation method. Teachers are more inclined to adopt thisteaching method into English teaching which usually consists of the following steps:teaching new words and expressions, analyzing the text by translating it sentence bysentence or even words by words, explaining the language points of the texts andthen doing the corresponding exercises. It is the teacher rather than the students whodominates the whole class. Students, as negative receivers show little interest inlearning and find reading class tedious. In short, traditional teaching method failed todevelop Art students’ reading skills and strategies effectively and meet Art students’personal differences and desires as well. They have still experienced a high level ofanxiety in reading English passages. Task-based language teaching is a promising teaching approach whichemphasizes on learning by doing. Task is the core in TBLT. Tasks can be designedaccording to students’ different needs and personal differences. In the process ofcompleting various tasks, students are provided with more opportunities to use thelanguage to communicate and cooperate with each other in a more relaxingclassroom environment. After accomplishing the tasks, students can gain moreconfidence and a sense of achievement in learning English. Taking the currentEnglish learning and teaching situation in Art colleges into consideration, the authoraims to study the effectiveness of Task Based Language Teaching on alleviating artstudents’reading anxiety.This research has the purpose of exploring the two questions below:(1). Can the application of Task-based language teaching effectively alleviate theArt majors’English reading anxiety?(2). Is Task-based language teaching effective in improving the Art majors’English reading competence?An teaching experiment was conducted in Shandong University of Arts by theauthor for18weeks. The participants of the teaching experiment were sophomoresfrom two parallel classes majoring in Design. One class was randomly selected as thecontrol class and the other was assigned as the experimental class. Task-basedlanguage teaching was adopted in the experimental class. While the traditionalteaching method was implemented in the control class. The research instrumentsincluded Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale(FLRAS), which was designed bySaito et al and two reading part of CET-4test papers. SPSS V17.0was employed toanalyze the data collected both before and after the experiment. Through thestatistical analysis of students’ FLRA and reading scores in the pre-test and post-test,the research results were revealed by the author.After a semester’s research, students’ FLRA and English reading competence ofthe experimental class has been alleviated and improved effectively. However, therehas been only a little change in that of the control class. Thus it proved that Task-based language teaching is effective in alleviating art students’ FLRA andimproving their English reading competence.This study has achieved some new findings about the application of TBLT incollege Art students’ English reading class. Besides, the author also points out somepedagogical implications for English reading teaching. In addition, due to somecertain restrictions, there are also some inevitable limitations of the study. Forexample, the limitation of participants and experimental time. In the end, the authoroffers some suggestions for further research.