the-implication-of-tblt-to-reading-teaching-in-high-school--英语本科毕业论文.doc

The implication of TBLT to reading teaching in high school
Abstract:
In this thesis, we will talk about how to use TBLT to teach reading in high school. This thesis consists of three parts. The first part is brief review of TBLT, in this part we analyze the definition and the features of the task; second, we talk about the present situation of reading teaching in high school, we point out that there are some malpractices in traditional reading teaching, so we advocate the teachers to use TBLT.
Key words: task, reading, TBLT
Introduction
Reading plays a more and more important part in today’s English teaching and learning in senior middle school. English competence is the basic prerequisite for developing other kinds of language competence. Especially for the students in China, without the natural language environment, English reading is not only one of the main basic skills, but also the important way to develop other language skills. In addition, emphasis on the development of reading competence, to some extent, means introducing to students the practical self-taught ways of learning English. And they can keep a benefiting a lot from their reading ability after their graduation from schools. So we should pay a special attention to the English reading teaching and learning in senior middle schools. However, due to the deep-seated traditional teaching theories and methods, there are not many efforts to be made to the research of reading teaching. As a result, the teaching of reading in senior middle schools is not so satisfactory, and the students have various difficulties in English reading comprehension in their studies and examinations. Students’ reading barriers have directly influenced their integrating language competence. The problems of reading teaching among senior middle schools are serious and need to be improved as soon as possible. Task-based language teaching can solve these problems that appeared in reading teaching. Now in this following thesis we will talk about how to use TBLT to teach reading in high school.
1. Brief review of task-based language teaching
1.1 Definitions of a task
Task-based approach in recommended as an effective teaching method by English curriculum
Standards for Secondary schools (2001), an official document of ELT for secondary schools by the Ministry of Education of China. Following the guidelines of the curriculum standards, textbooks (2003) of Junior English for China and Senior English for China are claimed to be task-based with many tasks, which prioritize meaningful communication through English channels. As a matter of fact, many leaching-learning materials have also made the similar claim. It seems that the application of task-based approach to materials development is quite fashionable in China today.
What is task? The most general definition given by long (2000:5) that “A piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some reward. Thus, examples of task include painting a fence, dressing a child, filling out a form…in other words, by “task” is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between.”
Four features of a task: A task involves an activity of some kind. It has a specified outcome
when it has been completed. It may require language comprehension or language production or both. It requires that learners focus their attention principally on meaning rather than form. (Long, 2000)
1.2 Features of TBLT
PHD.Lu conclude five features of TBLT
TBLT is a new form of communication but not replacement;
a. TBLT emphasize teaching process, it try to let the students attend learning process and form an ability of using English;
b. TBLT emphasize developing the ability using English to communicate;
c. TBLT emphasize that true life task should regard as teaching centered activity;
d. TBLT demand that teaching activity is beneficial to the development of synthetically language using ability.
1.3 The advantages of TBLT
According to liuqian (2003), the advantages of TBLT include most of the following points:
a. It is helpful to students to stimulate their interesting of learning;
b. It is helpful to form the curricular target;
c. It is beneficial to develop subject function;
d. All the students can be taught bestly;
e. Adopting TBLT is helpful to broaden the range of knowledge;
f. Adopting TBLT is beneficial to develop students in full scale;
g. It is beneficial to help the students to get the ability of leering in all their life.
2. The present situation of reading teaching in high school
First of all, let us look at a case of reading teaching as following:
There are fifty states in the United States. The largest in population is California; the largest in area is Alaska. Alaska is the smallest in population and Rhode Island is the smallest in size. The oldest states are the ones along the Atlantic coast. The newest states are Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska is also the coldest state. California and Florida are the warmer. Henry and his family live in Seattle, a big city, on the Pacific coast. But Los Angeles and San Francisco, also on the Pacific coast, are larger than Seattle. Henry's cousin, Susan, lives in New York. It is the largest city in the United States. Thousands of people visit New York each year. The most important city in the United States is Washington, D. C. It is the capital, but it is much smaller than New York.
Step1. The teacher read the material;
Step2. The teacher analyze the material without any pictures, when the students meet the new words, the teacher tell them the meaning directly, next the teacher let the students mark the phrase that appeared in the paragraph;
Step3. After analyzing the material, the teacher write some questions on the blackboard then ask the students to find the answers from the material.
This method of reading teaching has some problems: the teacher should let the students preview the text with some questions rather than analyze the text firstly; when the students meet the new words, the teacher explain the text at the first time, they may let the students guess the meaning through the whole of the text; in the class the teacher is the subject, the students are object, the teacher have been speaking, the students do not have enough time to think or consider; as a result, the students understand some parts of the text or master some parts of the knowledge, the effect is very bad. From the above case we conclude that most of the traditional reading exercises are actually testing students reading comprehension. We have emphasized that the teaching of reading should focus on developing students reading skills. TBLT can achieve developing students reading skills.
3. The implication of TBLT in reading teaching
3.1 Teaching reading
3.1.1 Definitions of reading
Many attempts have been made to define or describe the aspects of the nature of reading. Teachers of English should have a reasonable idea of what is involved in the reading process, then they are more likely to be in a favorable position to help their students by deciding the types of reading matter the students should be exposed to and selecting appropriate teaching techniques so that the students could read efficiently the material presented to them.
It is generally agreed that reading is an active process of readers’ combining information from a giver text and their own background knowledge to make out the meaning of the written langrage. It is a silent, individual and extremely complex activity. By analyzing the elements involved in reading, which have been proposed by Peter Stevens (1983).
3.1.2 The nature of reading
(1) Reading is universal
Reading is carried out through the sense of sight. Effective reading requires the training of the muscles of the eyes to perform a number of tasks: to change focus as necessary; to seek a brief, large scale, general view of the text; to find a starting point; to change focus and scale so as to identify the language at the starting point; and then to follow along the text and proceeding at a speed which meets the understanding rate of the learners’ brains.
(2) Reading is organized and systematic
Written language possesses beginnings and endings. It contains many internal breaks and
divisions-spaces between letters or characters; bigger spaces between words; spaces between sentences; spaces between lines; paragraph divisions; chapter divisions; the conventions of punctuation, etc. It selects a set of visual symbols-letters and characters, together with diacritics, upper-case or lower-case distinctions, different styles of representation of the same shape such as roman, italic, printed or hand-written, etc-and it arranges these symbols in sequences or strings of varying length. The reader has to learn to be familiar with all these conventions of shape, sequence, arrangement and visual effects.
(3) Reading is arbitrary and abstract, but meaningful, but meaningful
With some rare and partial exceptions (e.g. some characters in Chinese, etc.) the shapes of the
Symbols used in written language are arbitrary; they are unrelated to the real life forms of whatever it is they refer to. Letters, words, sentences and longer stretches of the text relate to meanings of several kinds and these relations are specific to each particular language. At the same time, written language always embodies visual clues to information of three kinds; of a grammatical kind, a lexical kind and a semantic kind, and in most writing systems the written language is a direct transformation of the spoken langrage.
(4) Reading is related to a particular language and society
Writing is not only a mechanical process. It has great social and cultural importance. It is the embodiment of the history, achievement, customs, literature, values, beliefs, of a whole people, because it can build up and fix over a long period of refection of a society’s organized thought, However, the transmission of culture and ideas is only one of the functions which writing performs.
3.1.3 The elements concerning teaching reading
(1) The reasons for reading
People usually read different things in different ways for different purposes. Generally
Speaking, there are the following main reasons why people read.
The first reason is reading for information, which means that reading can help extend
readers’ general knowledge of the world. For example, readers read newspapers, magazines, and reports to know what is happening or has happened.
The second reason is reading for study or learning. Readers may read because they want
to know more about the topic covered by a book. This is reading considered as type of study. There are several languages where the word for “read” is the same as the word for “study”. For example, reading specialized articles, teaching materials and dictionaries are for this purpose.
The third reason is reading for survival. By reading, people obtain instruction on how to
perform some tasks for their work or daily life. For example, a person may read the instruction on a medicine bottle to see if it is suitable for his sickness and how much to take.
The fourth reason is reading for enjoyment or pleasure. People read novels, stories and poems as a leisure activity. Many authors write simply to entertain the readers, and take readers into a world of adventure or romance which they could not normally enter.
Readers also read because they want to improve their own use of language. People who have spoken English all their lives still try their best to learn more by reading. As they read, they allow their mind to accept and absorb unconsciously the use of words and the use of language.
(2) Types of reading
What are the different ways of reading?
The readers read different texts in different ways, depending on their purposes for the reading. Some important categories are:
(a) Skimming
The eyes run over the text to discover what is about, the main ideas, and the gist. For example, when reading a newspaper, the reader often glances over the headlines until he finds an article that catches his interest. When he does this, he is skimming for the general sense or the gist of the article. He wants to know what is in the article but only on a rather superficial level. Anther example is when the reader looks quickly at the content pate of a book, or at the chapter headings, subheadings, etc. This is sometimes called previewing.
(b) Scanning
The reader is reading quickly for a specific piece of information. For example, people may want to see what’s on television this evening at 8 o’clock. They are unlikely to start reading form the beginning of the list of programs. Instead, their eyes move quickly over the page until we find 8 p.m., and then they start reading the details of the programs.
(c) Extensive reading (or fluent reading)
This is the way of reading in order to gain an overall understanding of a longer piece of text –perhaps a story, an article or a novel. While reading, we don’t worry about individual words and sentences and get caught up in the general flow of piece.
(d) Extensive reading (or fluent reading)
It is typically used with short sections or sentences when we need to understand or study information or language use in detail. For example, by skimming, we may find something in the newspaper really interesting that we want to read in detail. We want to read it again, more slowly, taking in the information and perhaps most typical language classroom focus is intensive reading, which involves a short reading passage followed by textbook activities to develop comprehension or a particular reading skill.
(3) The skills involved in reading
Recognizing the script of a language
Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items
Understanding explicitly stated information
Understanding information when not explicitly stated
Understanding conceptual meaning
Understanding the communicative value (function) of sentences and utterances
Understanding relations within the sentence
Understanding relations between the parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices
Interpreting text by going outside it
Recognizing indicators in discourse
Identifying the main idea form supporting details
Extracting salient points to summarize (the text, an idea, etc.)
Selective extraction of relevant points from a text
Basic reference skills
Skimming
Scanning to locate specifically required information
Transcoding information to diagrammatic display
(4) What makes an efficient reader?
Efficient reading depends first of all on having a purpose for reading. The purpose could be a very general one like reading a novel for pleasure; or it could be very specific one like looking up a dictionary for the meaning of a word. The purpose usually determines the appropriate type of reading, the appropriate reading