| With the development of the Economy Globalization and China's entry into WTO, the business communication between China and the world has become more and more frequent, so there is a great demand for qualified composite talents who are proficient in business knowledge and strong language competence. Therefore, Business English teaching receives more and more concern and becomes an important part of foreign language teaching. However, the current situation of BE teaching is far from satisfactory. Traditional teaching approaches are still practiced by many BE teachers in higher vocational colleges, which neither arouses students'interest and initiative nor improves their practical language skills. This situation in Business English teaching needs to be solved.As one of the branches of ESP, Business English teaching should emphasize language output and the cultivation of students'ability to use language in specific business working environments. In the teaching procedure, the teacher should focus on developing students'practical abilities in using the language and the teaching contents should be practical and well-targeted. The direct teaching objective is to make the students a real business person who can not only master necessary Business English knowledge and business knowledge but also apply them in various business environments correctly and smoothly.Practicality-inclined objective of higher vocational education further defines the significance and value of communicative competence training. However, there is a great contradiction between this objective and the current teaching approach. Influenced by the teaching mode of EGP, the current Business English teaching used in higher vocational college puts more stress on the study of lexical meaning, semantic features and syntax, which leads to such result that Business English teaching in higher vocational colleges can hardly meet the market demands. So, how to improve Business English teaching approaches in higher vocational colleges to ensure a better classroom teaching effect has become a top priority for the Business English teachers. The stress on development of students'communicative ability also makes it extremely necessary to find out more scientific and effective ways of English teaching.At present, more and more BE teachers in higher vocational colleges have attempted to use Task-based Approach in order to help Business English teaching out of dilemma. Based on the researches in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and concepts from Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Task-based Approach (TBA) took its shape in the 1980s. It emphasizes on learner-centeredness and learning by doing and enables the learners to cooperate and interact to improve their communicative competence and ability to solve problems. In recent years, a lot of English teachers show their interest in the effectiveness of TBA.The author finds that most of the researches in the field of TBA at present focus on English teaching in primary and secondary school and some are about General English teaching in universities while few are related to higher vocational college English teaching, let alone to mention Business English teaching in such schools. Owing to this vacancy, the author will put emphasis on the application of TBA in Business English teaching in higher vocational colleges.In this thesis, the author tried to prove the effectiveness of TBA in Business English teaching in higher vocational colleges.72 students majoring in Business English in Dongying Vocational College were selected as the subjects. In this thesis, the author made a research about the application of TBA in Business English teaching in the forms of experiment, questionnaires, tests and interviews and made quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis according to the results. The ultimate goal of the research is to explore an effective way to promote Business English teaching in higher vocational colleges. It is hoped that this research can bring in some beneficial initiatives on the reform in Business English teaching in higher vocational colleges. |
