An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Task-based Teaching On Senior High Students' Reading Ability

Reading is an active process of acquiring information from visual materials.Reading is a kind of thinking process of understanding, absorbing, appreciating,evaluating and exploring an article. Reading is an important part of English learning in middle school and one of the main goals of English teaching in middle school is to improve students' reading ability. Now reading has got more and more attention and researches on foreign language teaching. However, the author read a lot of relevant literature and the latest research results and found that reading is still a bottleneck for students to learn English. The reason is that there are some disadvantages in English reading teaching in middle school. Although the latest issued Full-Time Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(experimental draft) explicitly advocated task-based teaching in 2011, many teachers in high schools, junior or senior, are still using conventional reading teaching methods. Many teachers do not really use task-based teaching method in daily English teaching practice, and many senior high school teachers do not even know how to implement and operate the task-based teaching method in teaching practice. Meanwhile, the author found that, if any, the study of task-based teaching method is mainly in English teaching stages of junior high school and college, but the amount of task-based teaching researches in senior high school is relatively small and even fewer in high school English reading. Based on the above situations, the author thinks it is necessary to explore the task-based reading teaching method in senior high school English reading teaching, how to design reading tasks reasonably and how to apply the task-based teaching method to the teaching of the Oxford English textbooks in senior high school.The author uses literature review, a questionnaire, an interview and the experimental method to study English reading teaching in senior high school.Through the questionnaire and the interview, the author first understands and analyzes the main problems of English reading teaching in senior high school and what students' reading ability is. In view of the present situation of reading teaching andstudents' reading ability, the author probes into the application of the task-based teaching method in English reading class. The author made a three-month teaching experiment by carrying out the task-based reading teaching method in two senior classes whose total number is 88. According to the two research questions:1. Is the task–based language teaching method likely to improve students' reading comprehension ability?2. What are students' attitudes toward the task-based language teaching method in reading?Before the experiment, the author uses a pre-test to test students' reading ability and after the experiment, the author uses a post-test to test students' reading ability again. Through comparing and analyzing data of the control class and the experimental class, it is concluded that achievements of students in the experimental class which is used the task-based teaching method are significantly better than those of the control class. And learning interest and the teaching method are helpful to improve students' reading ability. Therefore, the feasibility and superiority of the task-based teaching method in English reading teaching in senior high school can be verified. At last, the author puts forward some suggestions on how to carry out the task-based teaching method in English teaching.