Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)

TBLT originates from Dewey’s view about the importance of experience for effective learning (Ellis, 2009) and emphasizes purposeful and functional language use by using real-life tasks in classrooms for learners to experience learning. Central to this approach is the task. Richards and Rodgers define TBLT as ‘an approach based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching’. It is assumed that in TBLT, the focus is on the process of doing the task, the skills and techniques involved. Communication and meaning are emphasized in the accomplishment of a task goal. Activities of a task are sequenced in terms of their difficulty. This difficulty of tasks, further, depends

Risk-taker and innovator: Many tasks will require learners to create and interpret messages for which they lack full linguistic resources and prior experience. Practice in restating, paraphrasing, and so on, will often be needed. The skills of guessing from linguistic and contextual clues, asking for clarification, and consulting with other learners may also need to be developed.

4. The roles of the teacher in TBLT The followings roles are assumed for the teacher in TBLT:

a. Selector and sequencer of tasks: the teacher selects, adapts, or creates tasks and plans their instructional sequence based on the learners needs, language level, and interest.

b. Preparing learners for tasks: the teacher prepares the learners for the task by introducing the topic, clarifying task instructions, providing demonstration of task procedures. The teacher may facilitate the accomplishment of the task by providing such hints explicitly or implicitly.

c. Consciousness- raising: Also, the teacher needs to help/guide the learners in focusing on the critical features of the language they hear in doing a particular task. The teacher is assumed to employ a variety of techniques and activities to achieve this goal, e.g attention focusing pre-task activities, guided exposure to parallel tasks

The teaching learning process benefits from these features of TBLT. Some benefits of TBLT are, viz., it provides a context for ‘natural’ learning is created within the classroom, it motivates the learners in learning the target language by actively engaging themselves in the task, successful accomplishment of tasks develops a feeling of confidence in the learners in using the target language, it focuses more on developing communicative competence of the learner than on accuracy. However, accuracy is not completely disregarded.

Although TBLT has many benefits, it is not free of challenges. Some common challenges that are faced in the implementation of TBLT are – it demands a high level of creativity, the teacher is deemed to be very dynamic, limited access to resources is a serious impediment, paucity of time is also a great challenge, and lack of proper training is another obstacle. Moreover, acceptability by the learners also affects the efficacy of the approach. Learners may, at first, refuse or object to Task Based Language learning in that this type of instruction is not familiar to