A Study On The Application Of Task-based Approach In English Translation Teaching For English Majors

The task-based teaching approach, which was put forward by Prabhu first, has beentaken the place of the traditional teaching approaches as one of the most effective teachingmethods since1980s. The traditional teaching methods such as the PPP (Presentation,Practice and Production) emphasize the authority of the teachers, textbooks and references,while the core of task-based approach is “learning by doing” and it is process-oriented andlearner-centered. Therefore, it can help teachers improve students’ linguistic competenceand communicative skills through various tasks instead of emphasizing on the languagepoints’ study.For English majors, it is very necessary to master the following five basic languageskills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. And there are lots of articles,theses and books about how to apply the task-based approach in listening, speaking,reading and writing more effectively, while few systematic ones about translation.Therefore, this thesis focuses on exploring how to apply the task-based approacheffectively in translation teaching and its effects on improving students’ translationcompetence and communicative skills.The thesis proposes two hypotheses:(1)The task-based approach can improve theEnglish major students’ translation competence more effectively than PPP approach.(2)The task-based approach can facilitate students’ more active participation than PPPapproach, such as arousing translation interest and building translation confidence.To test above two hypotheses, both the control class and the experiment class receivedthe translation tests, questionnaires and an interview. The collected data and results werequantitatively analyzed by SPSS17.0. Through the comparison and the analysis, it can beconcluded from the results that the task-based approach dose imporve English majors’translation competence; meanwhile, the task-based approach can facilitate students’ moreactive participation such as arousing translation interest and building translation confidenceindeed. Therefore, the application of task-based approach in translation teaching forEnglish majors is actually feasible.