The Application Of Task-based Language Teaching To English Reading In Senior High Schools

During the daily English teaching, the level of reading comprehension has been an important factor in assessing a learner’s linguistic competence. Most of senior high teachers have been guided by traditional approaches to teach their students for tests. But by using this way, students don’t develop their reading comprehension skill highly. So what we should do to make the students read fast and find out correct information has become a major problem for English teachers to solve in these recent years.The New national curriculum standard for English course claims the senior high English teaching not only develops the basis of the listening,speaking, reading, writing skills but also trains the students’ reading abilities especially. How to do it? Now, the Task-based language Teaching has been introduced into China and we found the Task-based language Teaching approach is a good way to solve the problem. It demands students to finish many tasks such as practice, participation, communication and cooperation with teachers’ help. Task-based approach can offer students enough space to practice and improve their motivation and creation in order to output effective information to finish the task which the teacher had made according to the teaching plans. At the same time, the aim of reading teaching is to train the students’ abilities of collecting and using the information. The thesis attempts to solve these problems:1) Does Task-based language teaching improve students’ reading ability?2) How can the Task-based language teaching improve students’ reading ability?3) Can Task-based language teaching improve the teachers’ teaching in the future?The researcher took an action to apply the Task-based Language Teaching in a senior high school, who carried out to answer the research questions. Two classes(class 2 and class 9) from Grade senior one took part in the research as the subjects, which did not accept the learning under the Task-based language teaching. Firstly, a questionnaire which includes the student’s motivation of reading, the usages of reading skills and the issues of reading comprehension was conducted. The way of the pre-test was used. The teacher designed and prepared some task-based reading tasks and activities about reading comprehension. These questions covered material information which can include foretasted tasks, information gap tasks, opinion gap tasks, problem solving tasks and decision-making tasks, discussion and so on. The students implemented these tasks and activities through individual work, pair work, group work and the whole class work. Finally, a post-test on reading comprehension was conducted and other questionnaire was delivered. The data obtained from the question tests and questionnaires were analyzed carefully.After the experiment finished, we have found that Task-based reading training can improve students’ reading ability and make them master some reading skills and strategies. what’s more, students have more interest and motivation to learn English.With the students’ interest development, teachers’ reading teaching has also been developed and enhance their confidence to explore better ways to reform their reading teaching by Task-based reading training.