Facilitating Student Engagement Through TaskBased Language Teaching Weihe

Facilitating Student Engagement Through Task-Based Language Teaching Weihe Xue Department of Literature and Art, Jinshan College Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University Fuzhou, China xwhecho@163. com Abstract Zhisheng Huang Department of Investments, School of Finance and Accounting Fuzhou University of International Studies and Trade Fuzhou, China Jason 188901016@163. com The study reports on a five-month-long empirical study of task-based language teaching in a college English interpreting class. This study aims to investigate the effects of task-based language teaching mode on student engagement. Eighty-eight English major students from a college in China participate in this study. The participants are randomly divided into two groups, and each group has forty-four students. Conventional teaching mode is applied in the control group while the task-based language teaching is adopted for the experimental group. A comprehensive interpretation ability test and a questionnaire on student engagement are administered to both groups as the pre-test and post-test. SPSS 22. 0 is run to measure the collected data. The results show that task-based language teaching helps to improve student engagement and their comprehensive interpretation ability, which provides a new way of thinking for English teaching in colleges. Text Over the past three decades, China's higher education has gradually shifted to a student-centered and production-oriented approach. However, as the traditional teacher-centered teaching mode is deeply rooted in the China, most Chinese university students still passively accept knowledge and show relatively low creativity and student engagement in the class [1]. Researchers have recognized the role of SE in teaching quality. Many studies have shown that there is a close correlation between SE and student achievement, and researchers agreed that SE has a positive impact on students. How to facilitate SE has become a critical issue in Chinese higher education. Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is an effective method to English teaching. However, it is worth noting that although SE and TBLT have been studied extensively, not much studies on their relationship have been carried out. Accordingly, to study the effects of TBLT on SE in the higher education in China and other countries should be given more significance. In the 1980 s, Prabhu firstly proposed TBLT, which was gradually recognized and widely discussed in the studies on second language acquisition. Over the past few decades, some countries have formally or informally adopted TBLT as a language teaching approach to help improve language learning. TBLT requires students to complete assigned tasks, and these tasks require students to focus on meaning expression and be able to use language in real situations [2]. The definition of the tasks of TBLT has yet to been agreed upon. The most widely accepted definition of TBLT is Skehan’s "a language activity in which there is a focus on meaning". Skehan believed that tasks should have the following characteristics: 1) the task should be goal-oriented; 2) the task should have a primary focus on meaning; 3) the task should have a clear pedagogic relationship to the real world language needs; 4) the task should have a clearly defined outcome [3]. Shehadeh and Coombe pointed out that tasks can enhance language acquisition and promote effective teaching [4]. TBLT is a student-oriented teaching mode, which focuses on solving practical problems and improving students' language ability as well as communication skills in the process of tasks completion. The study was conducted at a college in Fujian province of China. 88 English major students participated in this study. All the participants took the same English interpreting course, and were randomly divided into two groups of 44 students each. To fully investigate the effects of TBLT on SE, the participants took questionnaire surveys on SE before and after the experiment respectively to analyze the changes of SE level. SPSS 22. 0 was also used to analyze the data collected during the study. The SE questionnaire and the interpretation test were administered to all the participants before the study to assess their SE level and comprehensive interpretation abilities. The interpretation class lasted 5 months (20 weeks), with 2 consecutive lessons (90 min) per week. Both groups were instructed by Ms. Xue. Control group’s participants were taught by the traditional teaching mode for English interpretation lessons during the experiment. The TBLT was adopted in the experimental group. The TBLT class was divided into three stages: the pre-task stage, the performing task stage, and the posttask stage. Before the class (the pre-task stage), the instructor needs to reasonably arrange the teaching contents and show students the corresponding teaching objectives, learning contents, and detailed task requirements through different ways, including words, pictures, videos etc. Besides, students are guided by the teacher to form interpretation groups to work together and to accomplish the task. After the class (the post-task stage), each group can exchange feedback with each other, and then, as a group, submit a report. The report should include the personal evaluation and mutual evaluation of the group members. The teacher should carefully and comprehensively review the reports of each group, provide effective feedback to each group, and made formative evaluation on the performance of each group member in the task completion process to ensure that each student could actively participate in the task [9 -10]. Conclusion The above analysis shows that TBLT is effective in improving SE, thus effectively solving the problem of low SE in English interpretation teaching. In the model of TBLT, students are able to form groups based on their willingness and interest, and collect task-related materials under the guidance of teachers. Students have a long time to study independently and internalize the course contents, giving full play to their enthusiasm and initiative. The communication between students and teachers as well as other students improved greatly, thus enhancing students’ emotional involvement in learning. Besides, TBLT is student-oriented teaching model, which focuses on the cultivation of students' self-learning capacity.