Published by admin on 05 Mar 2008
What is task based language teaching?
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.
