On the Reading Teaching of Middle School English in Terms of TBLT Approac1

On the Reading Teaching of Middle School English in Termsof TBLT Approach姓名：谢小燕班级：英语3班学号：20088094AbstractThe teaching of reading in middle schools is an important part of English education. The main object of reading lessons is to cultivate and improve the student s‟comprehension of English texts. Many teachers may be familiar with the Presentation, Practice, and Production (PPP) model of teaching, however, this method has several limits in helping learners acquire the language for communication. With the increasing popularity of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), TBLT approach has been considered as one of the most useful and efficient teaching method in current days. This thesis attempts to discuss the reading teaching of middle school English in terms of TBLT approach, aiming to the reading ability of middle school students. Thus, TBLT approach should be advocated to develop middle students‟reading comprehension and communicative abilities of using a language.Key words: task; task-based language teaching; reading teaching1.Task-based Language Teaching1.1The definitions and features of a taskLong (1985:89): A task is a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others freely or for others, freely or for some reward. thus, examples of tasks include painting a fence, dressing a child, filling out a form, buying a pair of shoes, making an airline reservation, borrowing a library book, taking a driving test, typing a letter, weighing a patient, sorting letters, taking a hotel reservation, writing a cheque, finding a street destination and things people do in everyday life, at work, at play，and in between.Prabhu (1987:24): A task is an activity which requires learners to arrive at an outcome from given information through some process of thought, and which allows teachers to control and regulate that process.Willis (1996:23): Tasks are activities where the target language is used by the learner for a communicative purpose in order to achieve an outcome.Ur (1996:123): A task is essentially goal-oriented; it requires the group, or pair, to achieve an objective that is usually expressed by an observable result, such as brief notes or lists, rearrangement of jumbled items, a drawing, a spoken summary. This result should be attainable only by interaction between participants: so within the definition of the task you often find instruct ions such as …reach a consensus‟, or …find out everyone‟s opinion‟.Having a short glance at the above quotes, one can find a highlighted and fixed slogan as “using tasks for communicative purposes” .Obviously, there are varieties of tasks, but all of them have one common feature and that is every task is on solving a communicative problem connected with the real world existing problems of the students who may encounter every day, not just concentrating on one particular structure, function or vocabulary group. Considering this, the tasks used in TBLT classes must be carefully chosen to meet that slogan. Consequently, it might be possible to draw a framework within which we accept those kinds of tasks which imply the communicative purpose and reject the ones which do not imply that purpose. Anyway, we can draw a conclusion about the definition of the task:A task is an activity that needs learners to use the target language, with meaning at the core, to work purposefully towards an objective.1.2 Four components of a taskClark, Scarino and Brownell (1994:40) believe that a task has four main components: a purpose, a context, a process and a product.A purpose: making sure the students have a reason for undertaking the task.A context: this can be real, simulated or imaginary, and involves sociolinguistic issues as the location, the participants and their relationship, the time and other important factors.A process: getting the students to use learning strategies such as problem solving reasoning, inquiring, conceptualising and communicating.A product: there will be some form of outcome, either visible (a written plan, a play, a letter,etc.) or invisible (enjoying a story, leaning about another country, etc.)1.3 The definition of Task-based Language TeachingAfter analyzing the definitions of task, we can easily understand the meaning of Task-based language teaching:As an analytic approach to syllabus design and methodology in which chains of information-gathering, problem-solving and evaluative ask are used to organize language teaching and learning；these interdependent pedagogical tasks, which combine insights from sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, are designed methodologically simulate the communicative events which learners encounter in specific second language-using environments (Markee, 1994).1.4 The design of tasksStep1: Think about students‟ needs, interests, and abilitiesWhat are the needs, interests and abilities of the students? What kind of things do they like to do? What can they handle?Step2: Brainstorm possible tasksBrainstorm a list of communicative tasks of the topic(s) listed in your textbooks that students may be interested in dong. Bear in mind that a task should have a communicative purpose and should be goal-oriented. For example, making a guide for using the new library; making a poster illustrating with pictures and descriptions the changes that have taken place in the neighborhood in the past 10 years.Step3: Evaluate the listAfter you have brainstormed the possible tasks, you can use the following criteria to evaluate them.—Educational value—Appropriateness to the students‟ needs, interests and abilities—Availability of suitable resources—Time availableStep4: Choose the language itemsYou need to analyze the language items required by the tasks at two stages. In the first stage, you need to consider the level of linguistic difficulty in order to decide whether to accept, reject or modify a task that you originally planned. The second stage is when you have drawn up your final list of tasks. You need to work out the possible language knowledge and skills needed to accomplish the task. If necessary, some exercise-tasks or pre-task language practice may be designed to prepare students linguistically for the task.Step5: Preparing materialsAt this stage, you need to prepare the materials that the students need to carry out the tasks. As tasks involve the holistic use of communicative language, the students are going to need support in this aspect.2.Principle of Teaching readingWhen teaching reading, great care should be taken regarding how we should teach , which involves materials selection, task design, student motivation and skills development .Below are some principles for teaching reading.—The selected texts and attached task should be accessible to the students. Inaccessible texts and tasks do not help improve student's reading skills but cause frustration.—Tasks should be clearly given in advance. Preferably, tasks should motivate students.—Tasks should be designed to encourage selective and intelligent reading for the main meaning rather than test the student's understanding of trivial details.—Tasks should help develop student's reading skills rather than test their reading comprehension. If you always ask students to read passages them answer multiple choice questions, you are actually testing them not developing their reading skills.—The teacher should help students not merely to copy with one particular text in class but to develop their reading strategies and reading ability in general to that they are able to apply the strategies and skills learned in class to tackle other texts theyencounter outside class or in the future.—The teacher should provide enough guidance and assistance at the beginning to help students read and develop reading strategies but gradually withdraw his or her guidance as students progress so that they eventually become independent readers. 3. Three Main Activities of Teaching Reading3.1 Pre-reading activitiesBy pre-reading activities, we mean task that the students do before they read the text in detail. Such activities could be pooling existing knowledge about the topic, predicting the contents of the text, skimming or scanning the text or parts of the texts certain purposes, learning key words and structures. The purpose of pre-reading is to facilitate while-reading activities, Harmer (1983) call this stage of reading Lead-in, where teacher prepare students linguistically for the task in reading, familiarize them with the topic of the reading text, and draw on student's existing knowledge. One of the major reasons for this is to create expectations and arouse the student's interest in the subject matter of the text. Let's look at some pre-reading activities in details: predicting, setting the scene, skimming, and scanning.—Predicting is an important reading skill. The reader's predictions, whether right or wrong, will get his mind closer to the theme of the text to be read. Then the real read may either confirm or reject the predictions. Reading with predictions can make the reading more intriguing and purposeful and therefore is likely to result in better comprehension compared with the situation where the learner starts reading with a blank mind. Predictions can be done many different ways.Work in pairs. Look at the three titles below and predict the contents of the texts. When you are ready, join another pair to compare your predictions. Also, discuss the clues that helped you make the predictions.To begin with, students may mot be good at predicting. If so, the teacher can provide help by asking certain questions. For example, for each of the three texts above, we can ask these questions:Text 1: What is a pet? What are pets for? Why do people love pets? Are there any problems with pets?Text 2: What is a jungle? Where can you find jungles? What do you think has happened to the jungles?Text 3: What happened to the child? How do you think the parents would feel? What could the police do ?It is a good task for middle school students to predict the information of the titles. At the same time, it can improve students‟ reading skills after a process of practice.—The second type of pre-reading activity is setting the scene,which means getting the students familiarized with the cultural and social background knowledge relevant to the reading text.—The third type of pre-reading activity is skimming, which means reading quickly to get the gist, i.e. the main idea of the context, There are many situation where we do skimming .For example, when we read newspapers, we usually read very fast to get the main idea and only spent more time on those items that are more important.—Scanning means to read to local specific information, which means to read to locate specific information. The key point in scanning is that the reading has something in his mind and he should ignore the irrelevant parts when reading, On a day- to-day basis, we scan figures, train schedules, time-tables, phone numbers, news headlines, dictionaries, etc. So it is useful to use these materials for practice in the classroom. Questions for a scanning activity are often about specific information, such as: Find Mr. Smith‟s phone number; How many people were injured in theexplosion?3.2 While-reading activitiesDifferent texts offer opportunities for different kinds of exploitation. Yet a reading passage in a traditional reading comprehension textbooks has generally been exploited by means of multiple choice questions, T/F questions, open question, paraphrasing, and translation. In this section, we will look at some different ways of exploiting texts focusing on the process of understanding rather than the result of reading including information, transfer, and activities.—Information presented in plain text form does not facilitate information retention. When information in text form is transferred to another form, it can be more effectively processed and retained. The way to transfer information from one form to another is called a transition device. When reading a text, we need to bear in mind the purpose of transition device, such as, focus on the main meaning of the text; be able to simplify sophisticated input so that it become the basis for output; allow students to perform tasks while they are reading; involve all students in clearly defined reading tasks and precede one step at a time.—Reading comprehension questions, one of the most frequently used methods in teaching reading, is asking students to answer comprehension questions. Nuttall (2000:188-189) suggests that we can classify questions according to the kind of information that they require students to get from the texts, or the kind of thinking that we wish students to engage in.—One should understand references during while-reading activities. Sometimes students have difficulty with certain texts because they are unable to follow the use of the references. All natural language, spoken or written, uses referential words such as pronouns to refer to people or things already mentioned previously in the contexts, Understanding what these words refer to is crucial for comprehension.3.3 Post-reading activitiesHaving look at the pre- and while reading, we will consider a number of possible post-reading tasks. It is in this area, perhaps, that teachers have to be most inventive or imaginative .They have to design tasks which are relevant to text being study andappropriate to the students' level. The tasks can fulfill several functions, whether they are used in an extensive or an intensive reading context. At the post-reading stage, teachers often rely upon reading aloud, asking comprehension questions or asking student to paraphrase sentences of a text. Sometimes sentence by sentence translation is conducted. We consider activities inadequate to fulfill the functions of post-reading tasks. Post-reading tasks should provide the students with opportunities to relate what they have to read to what they already know or what they feel. In addition, post reading tasks should enable students to produce language based on what they learned. There are some ways to develop students‟ reading skills during post-reading, such as, discussion question, reproducing the text, role play, gap-filling, retelling and writing.4. The Application of TBLT in Reading Teaching in Middle SchoolWhen teachers recognize that each reader brings to the reading process as a unique set of past experiences, emotional and mental processes, level of cognitive development, and interest level in the topic, they also recognize that not all teaching strategies will be effective for all students. That is to say, to some extent, the students‟reading skills has something to do with the teaching method. Any teachers take great responsibility in forming students‟reading skills. Efficient reader, in any model of reading, should value developing reading sills as one of the most important tasks. Of course, there is no exception in the model of task-based reading. Generally, when designing reading class, teachers have to consider forming students‟ following reading skills in TBLT.—Using titles and illustrations to understand a passageGet the general idea and the main information of the passage according to the titles and the relevant illustrations of the author or the editors.—SkimmingSkimming is one of the major types of selective reading. It differs from normal reading in that not all of the material is read. Chunks of material of various sizes are skipped over. It differs from canning in that it is an effort to get general information rather than specific facts.—ScanningScanning is the term used to describe a selective reading process in which we are searching for certain facts or information. There are several levels of scanning, depending on what information we are seeking and why we are looking for it.—SummarizingA logica l conclusion can‟t be drawn unless all the facts are understood and carefully evaluated. Understanding evaluation facts depends on critical reading, which refers to a person‟s ability to understand the facts in the reading situation and evaluate or analyze these facts accurately.—Guessing word meaningsGuessing words in context and relevant meaning are reasoned by analogy with the help of logical relation between new and old linguistic materials. Techniques of logical reasoning enable us to expand the knowledge of learned material and material being learned and to develop students‟ linguistic touch or language feeling.—Becoming aware of the reading processReaders need a good knowledge of text structure. There is considerable evidence that knowing how a text is organized influences the comprehension of the text.—Taking risksReaders learn to find key words from a sentence, find the topic sentences from a paragraph for main idea and find the topic paragraphs from a passage or an article for the thesis, which is made up of topic sentences.5. ConclusionTo conclude,it has been observed that the task-based reading program is a good way to improve the students‟ reading comprehension and to create positive attitudes and learning behavior. This thesis tries to help the English teachers to facilitate reading teaching in middle school. At the same time, the students need to pay much more attention to reading skills and try to make use of the advantages of TBLT approach in their study.Reference:[1] Clark, J.L., Scarino, A. & Brownell, J.A. (1994). Improving the Quality ofLearing: A framework for Target-oriented Curriculum Renewal in Hong Kong: Government Printer.[2] Harmer, J. (1983). The Practice of English Language Teaching. London:Longman..[3] Long, M. H. & Porter, P. A. (1985). Group work, interlanguage talk and secondlanguage acquisition. In Working Papers 4(1):103-37.Department of English as a Second Language, University of Hawaii at Manoa.[4] Markee, N. (1994). Managing Curricular Innovation. 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