A Study On Using Task-based Reading Activities For Improving Senior High School Students' Reading Comprehension

Reading plays an important role in human communication. It is also one of the most efficient sources to get information. As comprehension ability is the most important ability in reading, reading comprehension items make a large portion in the university entrance examination. Thus, teaching English reading to improve the students' reading comprehension ability is one of the major concerns in English teaching.The English Curriculum Standards issued by China's Education Ministry (2003) advocates task-based approach in the middle school English language teaching. It explicitly points out that carrying out the task-based teaching approach may facilitate the development of the students' comprehensive abilities of language use.With the advocacy of the new Curriculum, the teaching of English reading in Chinese schools has been improved. However, the reading classes are still teacher-centered in many schools. The teacher mainly explains language points and sentence structures, whereas the students simply memorize new words, learn language points, and remember the grammatical rules. When doing reading exercises, some students are just satisfied with the literal comprehension of the passage and neglect the inferential and critical comprehension. As such kind of learning is rather passive and many students are lacking in the knowledge of reading skills and strategies, their interest in English reading is lost gradually.This thesis attempts to investigate whether task-based reading activities have impact on improving the senior high school students' reading comprehension ability, and whether task-based reading activities can facilitate the students' use of reading strategies.An action research concerning the application of Task-based Language Teaching in a senior high school reading class was carried out to answer the research questions. Fifty-six students from Grade Senior Two were chosen as the subjects. First, a questionnaire concerning the students' motivation of reading, the use of reading strategies and the problems with reading was conducted. And a pre-test on reading comprehension was also conducted. Then the teacher designed and prepared some task-based reading tasks and activities according to the topics in the textbook (SEFC II B). These tasks included brainstorming tasks, communicative games, information gap tasks, opinion gap tasks, problem solving tasks and decision-making tasks, discussion and many other tasks. In the English reading class, these tasks and activities were implemented by the students through individual work, pair work, group work and the whole class work. Finally, a post-test on reading comprehension was conducted and another questionnaire was delivered. The data obtained from the two tests and the questionnaires were processed by the SPSS (13.0) for comparison.The comparison between the subjects' performances in the two reading tests and the comparison between the reading performances of the subjects and the students in the other classes illustrate that the subjects who had taken task-based reading training improved their scores of English reading comprehension. The subjects also reported more use of reading strategies after the experiment. The research results suggest that task-based reading activities have positive impact on improving senior high school students' reading comprehension abilities and facilitate the students" active use of reading skills and strategies. In addition, task-based teaching of reading was proved to be helpful to stimulating the students' interest and evoking their enthusiasm for learning.