An Experimental Study on Task-Based Interaction in Improving College Students’ English Speaking Ability

Abstract

Nowadays, many college non-English majors’ English speaking abilities can’t meet the basic requirement of College English Curriculum Requirements. To solve the problem, taskbased interaction pedagogy was employed in college English speaking instruction. To probe the effect of the new teaching method, quasi-experimental design was adopted: the task-based interaction pedagogy was applied to College English Speaking instruction in the experimental class, while the conventional tasksupported approach was used in the control class. The experiment lasted for three months. Data of the pre-test and posttest were analyzed with SPSS software (19.0 edition). Results of the Independent-Sample T test and Paired-Sample T test were discussed. Findings showed that, compared with the tasksupported approach, the task-based interaction pedagogy was more effective in improving students’ English speaking ability after the experiment, and interestingly, most students’ English speaking abilities in the experimental class met the basic requirement of College English Curriculum Requirements, however, that of many students in the control class did not. Keywords-College English speaking ability; task-based language pedagogy; task-supported approach; task-based interaction pedagogy