| Reading is an important way for people to obtain information and communicatewith each other. In the process of English learning, English reading ability is the basisand prerequisite for the development of other language skills. The New NationalEnglish Curriculum Standard points out that English teaching should emphasize oncultivating students’ English reading ability to obtain information, processinformation, analyze and solve problems so as to lay a good foundation for furtherstudy. At present, English reading comprehension plays a more and more importantrole in English learning. Obviously, improving the students’ reading comprehensionability is important and significant.The school where the author works at is located in Xundian Hui and YiAutonomous County of Kunming City in Yunnan Province. Most of the ethnicminority students learn English relatively late and their English foundation is veryweak. What’s more, students don’t know what methods are appropriate for Englishlearning and most teachers employ traditional teaching methods in reading class,paying too much attention to the language knowledge and ignoring the cultivation oflinguistic competence. The passive, mechanical way of learning makes students loseinterest in reading, even show resistance for English reading. Therefore, in order tohelp minority students improve their reading ability and stimulate their interest inreading, this research did a reading teaching experiment based on task-based teachingapproach to explore its feasibility and effectiveness.The experiment was carried out in two parallel classes in Xundian EthnicMinority Middle School. The total number of the students in the two classes is128.The Experimental Class has65students while the Control Class has63students. Theauthor adopted task-based language teaching approach in the Experimental Class buttraditional teaching model was used in the Control Class. The experiment lasted fromSeptember2013to February2014. At the beginning of September2013,pre-questionnaire and pre-test were carried out in both the Control Class and the Experimental Class, which aimed to test the English level of the two classes and findout the problems the students met and their attitudes towards English reading. At theend of this term, the post-test was done in the two classes to check the effect of TBLTon English reading teaching. In order to get more information of implementing TBLTfrom the students in Experimental Class, the post-questionnaire and the interviewwere conducted in Experimental Class.By using computer statistical program SPSS10.0, the results of the pre-testshowed that the students of EC and CC had the same English reading level. After5-month experiment, the students taught by TBLT performed better than those bytraditional method and made more progress in reading test. The results from thepost-test indicated that there was great significant difference between the two classesin English reading. Besides, the data yielding from the questionnaires and interviewshowed the following aspects:(1) Task-based teaching is more effective thantraditional language teaching in arousing students’ reading interest in the ethnicminority middle school;(2)Task-based teaching optimizes the way students learn inethnic minority middle school;(3) Compared with the Control Class, students’autonomy of reading has been enhanced and proper reading strategies can be used inthe reading process in the Experimental Class.The experimental results showed that the students of EC can actively participatein designed tasks, read independently and adopt certain reading strategies in thereading process. Students’ reading interest has been improved and the reading scoreshave been enhanced greatly. Therefore, it has been proved that the task-based teachingapproach is helpful to improve the ethnic senior students’ English reading ability andhas a positive effect on English reading teaching of minority students. |
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