In the recent two decades, automaticity, a concept with a long-standing history in psychology, has been applied into the field of language science, especially in second language acquisition and language teaching. With automaticity attracting more studies from researchers, considerable progress has been made in understanding the nature of automaticity, the conditions under which it may be acquired, and the criterion to identify the presence of it. However, in China few researches on oral automaticity have been conducted as not much attention was paid to this phenomenon. Thus, it is necessary to study how to develop EFL learners oral automaticity in Chinese context.　　 The present empirical study aims to investigate whether the task-based language instruction(TBI) is a method contributing more to the formation of oral English automaticity in Chinese EFL classroom of higher vocational education. Subjects for the present study were 40 native speakers of Chinese, aged between 19 and 21 years old, enrolled in the undergraduate programs at Guangdong Jiaotong College. The subjects were selected based on the no significant difference in their oral English performance in the pretest. Subjects from both the Control and the Experimental classes took a 90-minute oral class on a weekly basis throughout one semester of approximate 16 weeks. They were taught by the same instructor, the candidate, and were presented with the same learning material, but with different teaching approaches. The Control Class was taught in the traditional approach, while the Experimental Class was taught in the task-based communicative approach.　　 The assessment material was drawn from Public English Test System Band Ⅱ(PETS Ⅱ) and the test was taped and partly videoed. Then the test results were processed by statistical software SPSS 16. 0 for quantitative analysis to obtain the data for the study. And an investigation was also made into the difference in the use of communication strategies for qualitative analysis. The post-test and the investigation results were presented and discussed in terms of the difference in oral automaticity, in the correlation of fluency and accuracy, and in the use of communicative strategies.　　 The conclusion and the pedagogical implications are drawn as the follows:　　 1、The task-based instruction approach is more effective in enhancing students oral automaticity than a traditional approach, which was shown in the post test that the subjects from the Experimental Class performed significantly better than those from the Control Class, especially in fluency;　　 2、Once oral automaticity was achieved, the contradiction of accuracy and fluency in EFL learners speaking performance is lessened, though they were still negatively correlated;　　 3、Learners under TBI approaches are more likely to choose proper communication strategies to enable their communication more effective.