Task-based Language Teaching TBLT

Abstract

When you ask learners why they enrolled in a language class, they typically will give answers like ‘because I need it for my study and work’; ‘because I want to be able to talk with the family of my partner’; ‘because it is my favourite holiday destination and I want to be able to speak to the people’ or ‘because I really like the language’. In all the years, I have worked as a language teacher myself, I have never met a student who answered: ‘I really wanted to learn past progressive’ or ‘I need to become better at phrasal verbs’. Sometimes, a student might wish to have ‘more vocabulary and better grammar’ as they feel they cannot express their intentions well enough for smooth communication. Still, irrespective of whether they are intrinsically motivated to learn the language or take a more instrumental view as they need it for educational or professional reasons, language learners across the globe usually learn a language because they want or should be able to do something with the language in interaction with people that also use that language to communicate. Inherently, second language (L2) learning is to a large extent socially driven: we want to become a member of the community of speakers that use the target language (Atkinson, 2010). These voices stand in contrast to what we still see in a lot of language teaching material and course books, that adhere to a structurefocussed PPP tradition: isolated structures are being presented and explained – followed by exercises to practice them – followed by communicative activities where students can demonstrate that they can perform in the language using the target structure. In the early 1980s, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) emerged as a functionally oriented alternative to the PPP tradition (van den Branden, Bygate & Norris, 2009). In this short essay, I will present the main concepts and ideas that underly task-based language pedagogy.