Question: Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)
Task-Based Language Teaching
Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is a teaching approach which focuses on offering learners’ tasks so that they can actively engage in using and practicing language in communicative situations, and on measuring the language outcomes that will arise from those tasks.
For example, a speaking task can develop students’ ability to speak fluently and accurately when communicating with their peers (David Nunan 2004, is an Australian linguist who has focused on the teaching of English. He is the author of the ELT textbook series “Go For It!”). To put it differently, in TBLT, the basic aim of second language teaching is to enable learners to use the target language for social functional action or situation communication. TBLT can be considered a branch of communicative language teaching (CLT).
Task of TBLT
“Task-based Language Learning and Teaching “published in 2003, Rod Ellis in his book has defined tasks or activities having four kind of criteria:
- Focus on meaning
- Some kind of gap such as information etc.
- Use your own linguistics resources
- Having communicative outcome not simply display of language
More Notes of ELT
Task is divided into two categories in TBLT
Numerous definitions of “task” have been provided by different scholars, and each definition has its own focus. Nunan classifies “task” into pedagogical tasks (occur in classroom) and real-world tasks or target tasks (occur beyond the classroom). According Ellis, two types of tasks are as follow:
Unfocused task: Unfocused tasks are tasks that are designed to illicit general sample of language that is to say they have been not decided in such a way for useful and essential grammatical structure.
Focused task: The focused tasks are tasks that have been designed to create a communicative context for the use of predetermined grammatical structures.
Ellis in his book “Task-based Language Learning and Teaching” considers three principle ways in which focused tasks or activities have been designed by the researchers:
- Structure based production task
- Comprehension tasks and
- Consciousness raising task
The above designing of focused task focuses that linguistics resources are inevitable for producing language in which students can perform effectively the communicative purpose of language. To put it differently, students can reconstruct a text using key words and phrases which is called ‘dictogloss’ promote overall syntactic process.
The task which are not comprehensible to the students should not be included for target language learning. For example: The task of astronomy is not perfect for average students.
And finally, it can be concluded that the focused task in the way that implicit learning will be emphasized based on incidents in such a way which can enhance explicit aspects of language. To express it in another way, consciousness raising tasks aims to teach grammatical rules inductively.
