Task Based Language Teaching Methods

1. How effective are CLT activities ( language games, role plays, problem-solving tasks, information gaps, and interviews) used in class on improving students’ communicative competence?

“Listening is perhaps the most essential skill for second/foreign (L2) language learning, particularly at the beginning stages. It internalises the rules of language and facilitates the emergence of other language skills” (Stella Hurd and Tim lewis, 2008).Communication is vital part of our daily lives .we sit in a school listen to the teachers we read the books we talk to the friends watching television and communication over through the internet. “Communication involves at least two people: the sender and the receiver” (Viva career skills library, 2007).

Communicating what we want to say, how we want to say it is the goal of expressing ourselves linguistically. For English Language Learners (and their teachers), the ability to do that successfully in their new language presents a challenge. In the content areas of instruction, it is especially important to draw out the information that a student already knows in their native language – even when they do not have the linguistic ability to express themselves in English – in order to assess their level of understanding and engage prior knowledge. Using non-linguistic representations provides a way of bridging that gap between actual understanding and the ability to express that

Archakis (2006) states that the communicative approach has recently prevailed. The purpose of language teaching is to help learners to practice relevant cases of communication. According to the communicative approach the language teaching has to be directly interrelated with contextual components. The stress of language teaching needs to be language use in social events, that is, students should be aware of the socio cultural and sociolinguistic skills for appropriate language use. Oral discourse is an entity of a range of discourse genres such as a lecture, conversation. Oral speech should be taught on a regular bases involving students in various activities and social circumstances. The teaching of oral discourse should be centered on the specific features of oral speech that promotes participation. It is very helpful for students as contemporary society concentrating on oral conversational speech and its peculiar daily used devices. This leads learners to the production of dramatization, interpersonal contribution, arguing competence as well as building identity as critical

Sometimes more than one method is used to bring out the anticipated outcomes in the language classroom where communication develops the key factor of teaching-learning process. Unless students learn to utilise the classroom method to express thoughts and feelings outside into the real world situations, the learning cannot be effective no matter whatever teaching method is applied in English as a Second Language classroom. Teacher- student role becomes the centre in bringing out the maximum within the limited time in a

Task-based language teaching is an approach that use task as the basic teaching strategy. Task-based language teaching is a

Language learning has many misconceptions. One specific misconception is that second language learning is simpler for young children, but in all actuality language learning is difficult and complex for people of all ages (Ovando and Combs, 2012). The timeframe for acquiring a second language can be lengthy and varying greatly depending on the individual learner (Ovando et al., 2012). Teaching an ELL student to read English can be perplexing often causing the brain to multitask concurrently (Ovando et al., 2012). When instructing literacy there are five components that work together for literacy success: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension and fluency.

This paper presents results from an online survey designed to explore teacher perceptions of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) in the Canadian context. The survey was grounded in Ellis’ (2009) definition of TBLT as focusing on communication and meaning with a necessary exchange of information, a reliance on students own linguistic resources and an ultimate outcome. Participants were recruited from the Teachers of English as a Second Language Canada Federation (TESL Canada) membership, with a total of 217 out of a possible 6,833 members taking part. Through the coding and grouping of participant responses, emergent themes arose in the data regarding successful examples of TBLT tasks, the benefits of TBLT, the drawbacks of TBLT, and participants’ further thoughts on the topic.

Every English language student is expected to master the four language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Among these, listening is a greatly integrative skill and it plays a vital role in the process of language learning, promoting the rise of other language skills since it is the first skill students are exposed to. It is a receptive skill which involves taking in information through the ears, processing and understanding the message and its importance and giving feedback. Actually, listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life, since people listen twice as much as they speak, four times more than they read, and five times more than they write (Morley, 1991:82). In spite of its importance, teachers appear to avoid teaching the listening skill to their students and focus only on speaking, writing and reading skills. Listening is commonly viewed as the most challenging skill both to learn and teach, because of its temporal nature, the complexity of the listening processes and the special features of spoken language (Ur, 1984). What is more, the constrained class time, lack of resources at

Task Based Language Teaching (TBT) has received a lot of attention in the recent years and language teachers consider it as a very important and popular part of learning and teaching process. Many researchers have conducted studies on different aspects of task based language teaching. (Robinson 1995; Skehan & Foster 1999; Yuan & Ellis 2003; Gilabert 2005)

Lin, T., Wang, S., Grant, S., Chien, C., & Lan. Y. (2014). Task-based teaching approaches of Chinese as a foreign language in Second Life through teachers’ perspectives. Procedia Technology, 13, 16-22.

It has been proven through research that young learners benefit from participating in both informal and formal talk throughout the school day. The aim of teaching a second language is to assist the young learner to speak fluently and communicate effectively in a second language.

Andon investigated the influence of TBLT theory and research on teachers’ conceptions and practices of task-based pedagogy on the grounds that task-based language teaching (TBLT) has gained enormous popularity and it has been compiled into a considerable variety of countries’ curriculum. Two interconnected questions

The clip can be viewed as a sequence of “episodes” where each episode is “a bonded unit which roughly correlates with a single teaching activity” (Gibbons, 2006:95). The class follows the 'task-based teaching ' structure found to be common in English as a second language and moves from listening tasks to a speaking task.

In this section we draw on the TIP task to illustrate a number of general features of second language tasks. First, as can be seen, the task is holistic in the sense that it requires learners to decide on potential relevant meanings, and use the phonology, grammar, vocabulary and discourse structures of the language to convey these in order to carry out the task. A second feature of any task is the need to achieve one or more meaningful outcomes. This is essential for the dynamic of the task. In the TIP task, the learners were asked to come up with a description of the likely owner of the objects. Depending on the teacher’s instructions this could take one of various forms: written, oral or possibly a non-verbal representation, such as a picture, set of notes or ID forms, selected from an array. What these have in common is a target outcome in the form of a verbal or nonverbal representation of information. That is, it is not sufficient for them to produce accurate language: they have to produce a pragmatically credible response.