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

With the rapid development of social economy, English has become one of the most widely-used international languages at present, which inevitably leads to growing interests in learning English. Among all the aspects of English learning, reading plays a vital part for the following reasons: First and foremost, reading is an important method for people to obtain information and know more about a language. Reading English will not only cultivate English learners’ language awareness, but also increase their vocabulary. Moreover, reading lays the foundation for other language skills. The wording and contents that students get from reading will definitely provide materials while writing and speaking.For Chinese senior middle school students who study English as a foreign language, reading competence improves mainly at school, to be more specific, in class. However, in the process of English teaching nowadays, reading materials are still treated as a tool to impart language knowledge by most of the teachers. Under this circumstance, the reading teaching is teacher-oriented and it takes the language knowledge as the main line. So it is hard to improve students’ reading competence. Accordingly, Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT) which focuses on improving students’ reading competence has been attracting the attention of many researchers.TBLT, aimed at arousing students’ interest in learning English and improving their reading competence, is a language teaching method proposed by foreign scholars in 1980 s. This teaching method is student-oriented, emphasizes “learning by doing”, in which case, students master the acquired knowledge by completing a series of tasks. In general, TBLT is an effective teaching method worthy of promotion. Scholars from home and abroad have conducted many researches on TBLT; however, most of those researches are limited to the implementation of TBLT in English classes in China. The application of this teaching method, especially on English reading teaching in senior high school classes, is relatively insufficient. Therefore, this paper, through an empirical research carried out particularly on the implementation of TBLT in English reading class in senior high schools, is focused on three research questions below:(1) Is TBLT more helpful to inspire students’ learning interest than the traditional teaching method?(2) Is TBLT more beneficial to form positive reading strategies than the traditional teaching method?(3) Can TBLT facilitate students’ reading competence more effectively than the traditional teaching method?A five-month experiment carried out by the author in Dengfeng No.1 Senior High School is to verify the effectiveness of TBLT in senior high school English reading teaching. The subjects of the experiment are 122 students from two parallel classes in Grade One. One is the experimental class; the other, the control class. TBLT is adopted in the experimental class, and traditional teaching approach in the control class. Questionnaires and tests are conducted among 122 students in the two classes before and after the experiment. At last, the author uses the SPSS software to analyze the results of the tests and questionnaires of these two classes. According to the analysis, the author finds that the students in the experimental class who take TBLT make more remarkable progress in English reading comprehension compared to the control class. It proves that TBLT is effective in improving both students’ reading competence and reading interest, and it’s also beneficial for students to form useful reading strategies.This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces the research background and the significance of the research. Chapter Two is the literature review, which includes two parts: in the first part the author introduces the related knowledge of TBLT, and also the current researches on TBLT at home and abroad; the second part discusses the definition of reading, models of reading process and the task-implementing model in reading teaching. Chapter Three tells the theoretical basis of TBLT, including constructivism, input hypothesis and interaction hypothesis. Chapter Four is about the empirical research, which introduces the procedures in this experiment. Chapter Five presents the results and analysis of the data in the experiment. Chapter Six is the conclusion part, which summarizes the major findings and limitation of the research, some suggestions for further study as well.