英语论文网

Chapter one Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
As an important receptive language skill, reading is of great importance incollege English learning. Good reading proficiency enables the students to useEnglish as a tool to obtain information and knowledge. College English CurriculumRequirements (2004)illustrates that ‘Students are expected to be able to employeffective reading strategies while reading…Students should be able to skim or scanreading materials…should be able to get a correct understanding of the main ideas,major facts and relevant details…and to read English literature related to their areasof specialty without much difficulty…’Whereas, having studied English for so manyyears, ta large number of Chinese college students’ reading performance is still farfrom satisfactory. Reading proficiency is influenced by many factors,The reasons canbe multidimensional. A great deal of researches have been conducted and showed thatthe affective factors have much influence on students’ English reading proficiency.And among which anxiety is considered to be one of the important variables whichcannot be ignored. Foreign language reading anxiety is a kind of fear andnervousness learners experience in a reading comprehension process. A number ofresearchers have founded that students’ English reading performance and theirreading anxiety are negatively correlated. Thus, students’ reading anxiety should betaken into account in English reading teaching.College art majors as a special group are quite different from other collegestudents in English learning for that they are enrolled into colleges depending on theirtest results of specialized courses and literacy courses. When facing English readingtasks, many of them even feel frustrated to some extent. Poor performance, lowinterest, lack of motivation and confidence and negative attitude towards learning arethe problems they faced with in English learning. The traditional teaching model isone of the vital reasons to account for this phenomenon.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
As mentioned above, reading anxiety plays an important part in one’s readingperformance and Art students have been exposed to a high level of reading anxiety toa large extent. However, the researches of art majors’ reading anxiety are still invacancy. Thus it is imperative to explore a new instructional method to alleviate artstudents’ reading anxiety level. Considering the inefficiency of the traditional methodof English reading teaching, task-based language learning is proposed to have a greatchange in art students’ English reading teaching and to develop students’ readingcompetence. Through the study, the author applied Task-based language teaching tocollege art students’ reading classes in order to find the relationship amongTask-based language teaching, the students’ reading anxiety and their readingproficiency. If the instructional approach of task-based language teaching proves tobe an effective way in alleviating college art students’ reading anxiety and improvingtheir reading proficiency in English accordingly, it will be of great significance tocollege art students’ English learning and teaching. On the one hand, this study willbe of great help to find a more appropriate teaching approach for English teachers inart schools. More attention may be paid to the difference between art majors andcommon college students. And the English teach