With the rapid development of economy and society, more and more people pay attention to English teaching. Vocabu-lary, the basic unit of language, is regarded as the center of language teaching by many linguists and educators. For Chinese stu-dents, vocabulary learning is also the most difficult and important problem in language learning. Unlike that in English-speaking countries,there is an absence of a foreign language environment for Chinese students, and most of their vocabulary is derived from classroom learning.Thus it is necessary to find an effective method to deal with vocabulary teaching. It analyzes college English vocabulary teaching, as college students have formed the corresponding language skills with more suit-ability. For a long time, students develop the habit of memorizing words repeatedly, consuming a lot of time, but the result is not sat-isfactory. Faced with this phenomenon, this paper analyzes the problems existing in College English vocabulary teaching and ex-plores the reasons of the problems. Then it analyzes the application of task-based approach in college English vocabulary teaching.