On Task-based Reading Teaching Strategies In Senior High School

In the 21st century, English teaching in senior middle schools in China is facing many new challenges. With the deepening of foreign economic and scientific development, English is playing a much more important role in people's daily life. Nowadays, to enhance reading abilities mainly depends on classroom teaching; the final aim of classroom instruction is to enable learners to use the foreign language in their work or life when necessary. Thus we should teach that part of the language which will be useful, and we should teach language in the way that is used in real world. However, as a result of long-formed historic habits and the influence from the examination-centered education, classroom teaching, especially the teaching of reading is not always the case. Very often there is a big gap between the use of language in real life and the traditional foreign language pedagogy. Real world communication is an integrated process which involves the active interaction with communicators in language environment. Traditional teaching syllabus has produced a set of discrete and ordered language items and regarded teaching process as the process of learning this set of discrete language items. The ability of reading doesn't get much improvement. Discrete language items can't make the language learning an integrated process. At the end of the 1970's and at the beginning of the 1980's, TDA came out in L2 instruction in North America and European countries; at the end of the 1990's, the approach was spread into our country. TDRT which uses task as teaching means can create a supporting condition favorable to catalyze learners natural and meaningful language use. In task performance, directed by task goals, learners try to make use of all resources and adopt various means to get information, which makes the learners active in learning. The New National Criterion for English Course (Department of Education, 2003) clearly advocates the use of this teaching approach, and teaching materials based on this criterion also include study tasks. However, advocating is one thing, implementing is another thing. In the reading practice, because there exist some confused ideas about the model of the teaching of reading using TDRT, many teachers know little about this approach and lack experience on how to use new teaching materials; traditional PPP methods are still popular. This research has applied the concept of Task-based Language Teaching to the English teaching of reading and come up with the general thinking of designing as well as detailed improved measures of Task-based Language Teaching by analyzing the definition, application of the theory of Task-based Language Teaching.