An Empirical Study Of Task-based Approach Of Oral Business English Teaching At Higher Vocational College

With the accelerated pace of globalization, especially after China joined the WTO, our society’s demand for talents with a good master of a foreign language and business knowledge is increasingly rising, so more higher vocational colleges have offered Business English courses. The teaching goal of higher vocational colleges is to develop practical skilled talents. Therefore, the Business English course of higher vocational colleges should not only focus on students’ basic language skills, but also pay attention to their practical application competence. In this context, there’s an urgent need to improve oral English communication competence, which is of great importance to higher vocational college students. For a long time, Business English teachers have been adopting the PPP(Presentation-Practice-Production) approach which does not produce much good effect on the students’ oral English skills. Therefore, it has become a top priority for teachers to explore how to improve business oral English teaching by breaking away from the traditional teaching mode so as to meet the demand for more talents with vocational skills.The Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT), which appeared in the 1980 s, emphasizes “learning by doing and learning by using”, and evolves from the communicative language teaching. In the task-based teaching situation, teachers try to judiciously integrate language teaching with application by designing workable tasks based on teaching contents and enabling students to learn and use English in the fulfillment of the tasks. By working on the tasks, students may build good relations of cooperation and improve their language application abilities. It is true that many scholars and educators have given plenty of theoretical presentations and made much practical application concerning the TBLT, but so far not much research has been made in the Business Oral English teaching, especially in vocational colleges.This study aims at investigating whether the TBLT can be effectively used in business oral English in higher vocational colleges. In the 3-month research experiment, the author of this thesis chose 60 sophomores of Business English majors from Wuxi Vocational College of Commerce with Class 131 as the experimental group and Class 132 as the control group. The instruments adopted in the experiment were pre-test and post-test, pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire so as to obtain authentic and objective experimental data. BEC Oral Test(Intermediate Level) was employed as the measurement of the experiment, and BEC Assessment Standard(Intermediate Level) as the evaluation method, which evaluated the students’ performance from the four aspects of grammar, discourse, pronunciation and interaction. The TBLT was used in the experimental class and the PPP approach in the control class. The study was intended to explore two questions:(1) Can the application of the TBLT model to Business Oral English teaching in vocational colleges improve the students’ oral English? If the answer is yes, in which specific aspect(s)?(2) What effects does the TBLT model have on the students’ learning of Business Oral English?After the experiment, the author compared and analyzed the data of the tests and questionnaires with SPSS 19.0. The conclusions are summarized as follows:(1) In comparison with the PPP teaching model, the TBLT model can effectively improve the vocational students’ communication competence and discourse organization.(2) By comparing the scores of the two standard tests we can see that the TBLT class and the PPP class have not shown much distinction in grammar or pronunciation.(3) According to the data collected from the surveys, students from the TBLT class have greatly improved in their interests, motivation, confidence in learning Business Oral English, and communication skills as well, while their feelings of anxiety, fear and nervousness have decreased. The author hopes that the findings of this thesis can contribute to similar research, and that higher vocational college teachers and students will pay more attention to Business Oral English.