The Effect of the Task- based Language Teaching Method on the Comprehension Ability of Iranian High-School Students

Abstract

The Task-Based Approach has obtained popularity in the part of language teaching since the last decade of the 20th Century and significant scholars have joined the discussion and increased the amount of analytical studies on the issue. Teaching the English language is based on a task-based language teaching is an effective way to improve linguistic knowledge and learners' comprehension. Reading and comprehension is one of the essential things to get meaning from the text. The emphasis on reading comprehension skills of foreign languages is one of the most important issues in language teaching. This research has investigated the impact of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) on reading comprehension ability and performances of Iranian students. For this purpose, 60 high school students in the third district of Tehran were selected as the participants. The two groups took a pretest to test reading ability. In the next step, they were divided to experimental and control group. The results showed that by t-test analysis, the experimental group with three reading task types in comparison to the control group with traditional method, showed better performance. Finally, the scores were compared by ANOVA test and the students in creative tasks performed better.