Chinese EFL Teachers’ Misunderstandings about TBLT: What They Should Do?

Abstract

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is frequently advocated as an effective language teaching approach to enable learners to use language through communicative tasks. Along with the improvement of English language teaching under the high-profile use of TBLT as a pedagogical innovation in English classes, there exist many misunderstandings about TBLT among the teachers and researchers in Chinese EFL context. The paper argues that TBLT is not only output-based, learner-centered and meaning-focused as commonly understood, but also input-based, teacher-centered and caters for language form. To date, there have been few systematic studies as such on EFL teachers’ misunderstandings in this field in China. This paper aims at identifying misunderstandings of TBLT from theoretical and practical perspectives in order to make clear of these great misunderstandings and provide suggestions as to what teachers should do to more successfully implement TBLT in the Chinese EFL context.