Task Based Language Teaching and Learning

Paper for publication taken from my MA research project. (zip file, PDF).

Research into vocabulary learning has found that Semantic Category Effects (SCE) (HakkiErten and Tekin, 2008; Finkbeiner and Nicol, 2003) hinder retention when words are learnt in semantically related categories. Other variables such as a word’s concreteness and word class have also been found to change learnability. In this study young Japanese learners (n82, average age 12) were tested to see what effect manipulating Concreteness, Syntactic Class and Semantic Relationship had on learnability. Statistical analysis showed that previous studies’ predictions about the effect of each variable had on learnability were generally confirmed.

How do Semantic Category Effects, Words of Different Levels of Concreteness and Syntactic Class Affect Vocabulary Retention in Young Asian EFL Learners

Here are  my MA Education term papers (PDF) for you use read and use freely in your teaching or research. To reference these please use the address of the website and include a link directly to each file. If you do use them please let me know!

Proposal for course materials

The role of interest in motivating 12-16 year old learners of English in Japan

The Eclectic Teacher – Approaches and Materials for a Teaching Context in Japan

Hear All About It Teaching Listening Strategies and Current Events through CNN News

How do Semantic Category Effects, Words of Different Levels of Concreteness and Syntactic Class Affect Vocabulary Retention in Young Asian EFL Learners (Research Dissertation).

Like many teachers I was faced with a wall of worry when delving into the mysterious world of phonics. Among the many questions I asked myself was what was this seemingly miraculous method, how could it be taught, what were lessons like and how could I teach this to second language learners when all the materials I could find seemed to be aimed at students with a fairly large existing English vocabulary.

Wiley Blevins was sat on a plane headed to South America to teach English when he was suddenly struck with the huge responsibility this job carried – that of teaching children to read and thus open the door to economic independence and cultural awareness and freedom.

He immediately set about learning as much as possible about the most effect way to teach reading for English language learners and Phonics from A to Z is the result of many years of study and practice in many different classrooms.

He starts with an introduction to reading and English, give erudite rationales for the efficacy of phonics instruction. This is followed by several chapters of very useful examples and lists of words which illustrate the phonics method and provide sample lessons and ideas for making effective phonics lessons.

He also shares the benefits of his experience, pointing out where kids have problems and how to anticipate and resolve them before problems set in.

In short, this book is probably the best value and most useful book on phonics available for teachers around today. Highly practical and also well supported with research but presented in a friendly and clear manner you’ll soon not only understand what phonics is all about, but be confident enough to develop your own materials and create interesting empowering learning sessions that will greatly benefit your students.

Although TBLT is a wonderful approach to second language acquisition there are times when students need to focus on forms to better get an understanding of a language area or skill.

One such time I think is learning to read in another language. English is notorious for being hard to read as there are 26 alphabet letters but at least 44 different sounds and a sometimes difficult relationship of sound to spelling.

Phonics is a proven method which helps native and second language learners get a grasp of written and read/spoken English. Phonics approaches typically focus on micro aspects of language such as the discreet sounds a letter or set of letters in combination represents.

For example “e” can be pronounced in several different ways, and this is seen clearly in the International Phonetic Alphabet which uses several special symbols to show each sound.

The book which inspired me to develop a phonics program is Phonics A-Z. Author Wiley Blevins provides a complete rationale and very useful sample sets of words and lessons for any teacher doing a reading program. However for ESL the challenges are multiplied as, especially for beginners, students may not have a grasp of the alphabet or much in the way of L2 vocabulary.

Phonics Goals

My students’ age range is 11-12 in their first year of Junior High School. Some come to school with a basic knowledge of the alphabet and some vocabulary but other have to start from pretty much scratch.

The initial program I’ve developed for this is an integrated language approach to reading and phonics instruction. My aim is to get students reading simple books (I’ve found the Dolphin Readers Pack: Dolphin Readers Pack (40 titles) to be excellent) within seven weeks of starting school.

The two hurdles to overcome are:

- vocabulary knowledge

- word readability

I’ve approached this by integrating a phonics program with vocabulary instruction so that the 40 most common words in the starter level books are both readable (i.e. students can pronounce them) and meaningful (they understand the words’ meaning and can therefore hopefully decode the text efficiently).

By learning the 40 or so “sight words” and combining these words with meanings and also phonics instruction when students are given the books to read they should feel and be confident that they can tackle the reading and not only understand the book, but also know how to pronounce the words and make guesses at words they are unfamiliar with.

The Sound Shapes of English

Another problem learners have is how to shape the mouth to pronounce phonemes well. Languages that don’t have English or approximate English sounds don’t have English mouth shapes so these have to be learnt.

This video is useful to show mouth movements and related letter combinations. I show this to students three times a week for several weeks to reinforce the sounds and movements of English.

Not only does this help with phonic instruction, it’s also quite funny.

Original page with downloadable video

Games

Although there is no replacement for face time with books, different activities can help reinforce the learning. One game that my students like, and which can get fidgety kids running around to let of a bit of steam is “hammer”.

The focus of this is to practice listening either at a micro level (letters or letter combinations) or you can expand it up to words or phrases or minimal pairs.

You’ll need either printed copies or I use a TV hooked up to a media player to display the images.

Get some sponge sticks or toy hammers and get into teams. Draw a square with four boxes on the board. Display the first slide and choose a letter or whatever and say it. Students then have to hit the corresponding square on the board (e.g. top left or bottom right etc).

Example Slide for Hammer

This zip file contains about 20 pages of word number combinations in jpeg format and the word docx file so you can change it to add your own or use as a template.

References

UK Education Department Phonics Program

When I first started studying Japanese, in Japanese, I was mighty confused.

Nothing was familiar – the scripts, the sounds the grammar were all totally alien to my Western mind, so i got a good introduction to how Japanese beginners feel when they encounter English.

I was taught in a very traditional Japanese way – listen, learn, repeat. Although it seems to have worked It was pretty tough and I’m sure that there are additional methods to use that can help learning.

The problem I’m faced with teaching first year beginners at Junior High School, around 11 or 12 years old, are manifold:

• Motivation
• Interest
• Ability
• School Mindset or Environment
• Class Control
• Fear

For many this is the first time to encounter English formally and with a native speaking, foreign, teacher. Others have been learning for years at cram schools or private language schools so have more familiarity with English. When shoved together in a new school with new friends and faced with a foreign face some kids can be overwhelmed and lose not only interest in English, but also in education altogether.

Using the TBLT ethos for beginners is slightly more difficult than for learners who already have some L2. However tasks that can integrate the goals of TBLT can be produced and successfully  delivered that solve some of the problems mentioned above.

The first step to cultivating helpful attitudes within these beginners is to focus on them and introduce tasks that can accommodate the lowest but also stretch the highest.

Taking a student centered approach offers the chance for students to relate to familiar situations in their everyday life and experience and begin to see how these can be expressed in L2. This is not only inherently interesting for them (its all about “me”) but also a social experience as students’ experiences are compared and contrasted by peers.

My goals for beginners are to develop topic focused vocabulary and grammar knowledge around students’ experience. To this end I developed some lesson materials that develop all of the language skills in different stages and different levels of intensity. You can download the free Tasked Based Lessons here.)

Tasked Based Beginner Lessons: A Walkthrough

The first step is to literally get a picture of the students’ experience of a topic. High interest familiar topics include food, sports, hobbies, christmas and a school trip. These events or experiences are all highly concrete and so available to all regardless of level of abstract ability and knowledge.

The first step is to introduce the theme and then get students to draw six pictures that they relate to that theme. This is a form of free association and brainstorming which helps to bring up their experience to mind. This “top down” part of the task activates L1 vocabulary and memory so that when L2 is introduced hopefully stronger bonds can be made between vocabulary items.

Second, students develop small vocabulary lists within three different word classes: verbs, nouns and adjectives. They are responsible for writing vocabulary that is related in the pictures and it makes things easier when negotiating meaning with the teacher  if students can point to their own pictures to explain things.

Once these lists have been made in L1 (and they vary considerably from student to student which is exactly the point of the exercise - individuality), and the L1-L2 translations are written the final stage is to start writing sentences which is basically a grammar exercise.

Simple sentence constructions are given for titles in columns and an example given. This shows how sentences are built up using different word classes and the order of word types in English sentences.

For example, the first column is titled “who” (the subject), followed by “verb” then “adjective” then “noun”.

As students try to describe their pictures in English they are forced to find vocabulary from different word classes to complete the parts of the sentence.

This process reinforces grammatical structure, raises awareness of different word classes and their positions in English, and is satisfying for students as construction of their own L2 language is scaffolded but also personally relevant which makes it motivating and enjoyable.

Another benefit is that students work at their own pace, with stronger students being challenged more by allowing a couple of free form sentences (game: how long can you make a sentence about your picture?) while weaker students don’t feel left behind or forgotten as the teacher can instantly assess the progress and intervene as appropriate to facilitate.

This is by no means a quick process but I believe that this slower but more meaningful method gives students more time to consider language and integrate it into their “interlanguage” hopefully making future study more enjoyable and successful.

Please download these free tasked based beginner lessons and if you use them let me know or show me how you’ve modified them for your own context.

There are numerous theories and approaches to teaching a second language, some exotic some mundane but all have one thing in common – a desire to make the acquisition of a foreign or second language as efficient and effective as possible.

Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is an approach which offers students material which they have to actively engage in the processing of in order to achieve a goal or complete a task. Much like regular tasks that we perform everyday such as making the tea, writing an essay, talking to someone on the phone, TBLT seeks to develop students’ interlanguage through providing a task and then using language to solve it.

Here are some of the main features of TBLT:

• meaning is primary
• there is some communication problem to solve
• there is some sort of relationship to comparable real world activities
• task completion has some priority
• the assessment is done in terms of outcomes

On the other hand, tasks:

• do not give learners other people’s meanings to regurgitate
• are not concerned with language display
• are not conformity oriented
• are not practice oriented
• do not embed language in materials so that specific structures can be focused on

Which leads to some examples of tasks:

• completing one another’s family tree
• agreeing on advice to give the writer of a letter to an agony aunt
• solving a riddle
• leaving a message on someone’s answering machine

but which rule out:

• completing a transformation exercise
• most Q and A with a teacher
• inductive learning activities where preselected material is conducive to the
• generation of language rules

(From Skehan, 1998 A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning).

From this we can see that tasks focus on form (rather than individual forms of many separate structures) and that learners have to actively negotiate meaning and produce communication to complete the task.

Skehan’s list offers some exciting and fun possibilities. When I introduce tasks such as solving a crossword and then getting the students to make their own and then share it with each other, or read about a topic and watch a related video clip, students become engaged with language and meaning as well as intensive cognitive processing which, I believe, induces interlanguage modification and development.

While students in my context in Japan are somewhat hesitant to engage or develop conversation skills in a school classroom, they are more than happy to take their knowledge and apply it to various tasks. However, even when they are required to speak given a task based approach they generally are eager to try and complete the task and perform it in front of others!

In short, TBLT is an approach which seeks to allow students to work somewhat at their own pace and within their own level and area of interest to process and restructure their interlanguage. It moves away from a prescribed developmental sequence and introduces learner freedom and autonomy into the learning process. The teacher’s role is also modified to that of helper.

Find and buy books on task based language teaching

Hi,

This site is a resource for all teachers interested in using Task Based Language Teaching as an approach to teaching whatever language you teach.

I graduated from an  MA in TESOL at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, and have been teaching English in Japan for six years. I’m also learning Japanese to help integrate here, but also to experience the frustrations and thrills of second language learning (my high school French was long ago consigned to the bin, but strangely enough when I started learning Japanese I kept speaking bits of French – weird!).

Anyways, I’m making and posting the materials I produce for my Junior and Senior  High School students here in Japan so please feel free to download and modify – and repost improved versions!

There is a nascent forum to discuss your experiences with TBLT and help all teachers worldwide interested in this to develop and improve materials and methods.

If you have any questions or problems registering then please email me with the contact form.

Cheers
Keith