An Action Research On The Effects Of Task-based Approach On Senior High School Students' Reticence In English Reading Class

Reticence,as one of the common phenomena in foreign language teaching,has achieved much attention by many teachers,scholars and researchers,but its exploring effect is still not satisfactory.Researches concerning English teaching suggested that students still tend to keep reticence and even reluctant to attend all kinds of activities in English classes.Many researchers had investigated the phenomenon in various aspects including cultural backgrounds,students' learning styles,personal traits,teaching styles and even questioning skills,but scarcely considering the effects of teaching methods,seldom in the way of action study.For the sake of contributing some practical proposals towards mitigating the reticence in English reading class,the researcher adopts a new angle—the task-based teaching approach,and then checked the students' reticence level after the intervention.The present research mainly explores the effects on the task-based teaching approach to classroom reticence in senior high school English reading class,and then put forward some practical proposals that can be used to solve the problem of classroom reticence.The research questions are specified below:Question 1: Can task-based approach be used to break the reticence in English reading class?Question 2: What is the effect of task-based approach on mitigating the English reading class reticence?Question 3: Why can task-based approach be used to break the reticence in English reading class?In the action research,46 students from Dong Jiang Senior High School in Heyuan,Guangdong participate in the research.The research lasts for over three months,and both quantitative and qualitative methods are used.The subjects are selected from Grade One,Class 8 with the same educational background.Before the research,questionnaire,classroom observation and interview are conducted for a survey on the classroom reticence situation and students' performance in English reading class.After the research,the instruments such as teacher logs,questionnaireand classroom observation are carried out to collect relevant data about the intervention of TBLT.By analyzing the quantitative data with SPSS 19.0 and discussion of all the results of the 2-round action research,the conclusions are drawn in order to answer the research questions:1.The task-based approach can be used to break the reticence in English reading class.2.The task-based approach can effectively mitigate the reticence in English reading class.3.The task-based approach can be used to break the reticence in English reading class because of its own characteristics.Finally,the researcher concludes that the application of TBLT can be feasible and effective in solving the problem of classroom reticence,thus paving a way and a foundation for further research in the future.