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Task Based Teaching and Learning
| Every teacher at least once in his teaching practice caught himself on a thought that the students are bored, they are asleep during the class especially while giving some grammar classes. So what to do to get them involved into the lesson, to engage them in what is going on in the classroom and at the same time to keep it as useful as possible?! I guess I found my solution to this problem. It is TASK-BASED TEACHING. This approach gave me an opportunity to involve every single student in classroom activities, even if some of them are shy or reserved. How did I get to the point where I needed to change my approach to teaching? That’s easy to understand - students showed that to me. I have always had high expectation about my lessons. Some people say if you set high goals you will achieve them. It is not necessarily true. I used to pay too much attention to grammar, introduce too many vocabulary items, trying to make my students more knowledgeable but….they were always tired and demotivated. I started to look through the teaching forums and decided to try the Task-based teaching for productive vocabulary teaching. And it worked out for me. Most of the teachers know about this approach, so I will only give a brief overview. TASK – BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING (TBLT) is an approach which offers students opportunities to actively engage in communication in order to achieve a goal or to complete a task. TBLT seeks to develop students’ interlanguage through providing a task and then using language to solve it. And here is how it works in the classroom environment: 1. The teacher chooses the topic (based on the curriculum and the students interests) and the way to immerse the students into the atmosphere of the situation 2. The teacher designs a lesson plan in the following stages: PRE-TASK (INTRODUCING THE TOPIC), TASK (THE STUDENTS COMPLETE THE TASK), PLANNING (THE STUDENTS PREPARE THE REPORT), REPORT ITSELF, ANALYSES, PRACTICE (written or any other exercises) 3. The teacher prepares the lesson: printing worksheets, changing the classroom, looking for the attributes of the performance where the teacher is just guiding students through the process BUT!!! This approach is for advanced teachers because the teacher can’t predetermine what language will be studied, the lesson is based around the completion of a central task and the language studied is determined by what happens as the students complete it. While using this approach students see English not as a goal of the studying but as a necessity. This method is mostly a reverse of a typical lesson: the teacher gives students the task and then he identifies what language the students need to be developed out of their task performance. It takes a lot to prepare but still it is not for everyday lessons, and if you want to gain the result here you go… In the next part I would like to offer a sample of the task- based teaching lesson. The following is the description of my first English club lesson based on TBLT: When the students entered the classroom they were curious of what was going to happen during the lesson, they were looking around, reading the notes, signs and trying to guess what would happen next. They were informed that starting from today they would be travelling to the USA and start the trip in the airport: “THE US – here we come!” Everything in the class was ready for the trip. There was a sign “AIRPORT” above the blackboard, I was wearing a suit similar to those the flight attendants use and was waiting for check in. The desks were rearranged so the class looked like having some steps to get through. The passports were stacked on the desk. The first task for students was to fill in the information about themselves. Then the students watched the video from the airport and it seemed that they were following the cameraman entering the airport check in area. British Airlines was the company we were using for the flight. The second task was to answer the questions about the ticket: • What is the company we are using? • What is the number of flight? • What is the terminal we are going to fly from/to? • What is the duration of flight? • Are we going to have any stops? For some students it was not easy to understand the information the ticket contained. When everything became more or less clear the students weighed the baggage and entered the control area. Duty free was the place where my students started looking around. Here I used a video of a regular student showing what is interesting for him in the Duty free area and as I think for the students of my class. This video was simply taken from internet (there are thousands of those nowadays). English speech of the guy in that video was clear and understandable. Next step was boarding. We listened to the announcement saying: “Passengers of flight SU 102, your boarding starts. Come up to the gates 33, please. Thank you”. We looked at the signs on the walls and chose the direction to the gates 33. We got into the plane and took our seats. Then we saw a sign on the interactive board saying: “fasten your seat belts” and the sign was twinkling. The engine started and we were finally on the way to New York. After some time of the flight I started to play the part of the hostess. I came up to the students and they got the third task when I asked: “Would you like anything to drink?” they had to make a choice. Some students decided to take coffee and juice. Later on some food was offered. It was the choice of fish and chicken. Finally the flight was almost over and I gave my students some papers to be filled in including the purpose of the visit and some other information (the fourth task). If you are not a citizen of the US you need to fill up 2 forms on the board: DECLARATION FORM and DEPARTURE RECORD. I have just made my students fill up the first one. And the standard procedure after the landing – APPLAUSE TO THE PILOT changed to the short passport control interview to the FISRT NATIVE SPEAKER in the lives of my students. This person was my American friend who liked to play the role of the passport control officer for my class being thousands kilometers from Kazakhstan. Interactive board and a good internet quality worked great for making our class more realistic. I made sure that all the documents were in the right order and all of us were waiting for the officer to invite the first student to the counter (the fifth task). The questions were: - What is the purpose of your trip today? - How long will you be in the US? - Where are you coming from right now? - Do you have any food, vegetables, alcohol, tobacco?... etc. As visitors we are required to have our photo and fingerprints taken. My students followed this step too. When everything was behind we were getting our baggage. But what happened?! One of the bags hadn’t arrived. And my students were going to the BAGGAGE CLAIM OFFICE. After filling up the claim form (the sixth task) the officer said that they had found the bag. At that time everything was done and my students were on their way out. HERE WE COME, NEW YORK!!! By the end of the lesson all of my students were very excited and saying that they can’t wait for the continuation of this trip. For most of them it was the first experience of ‘travelling’. I also used this approach for my next ENGLISH CLUB CLASSES and I will try to do a detailed plan for the teachers who are interested to make their classes more realistic and LIVE. I really think this approach can be useful not only for English teachers. I will try to prove it with the help of my next article based on TBLT which will work out for English and Math teachers. Some teachers like to be given practical guidance on how to improve their teaching, yet what they really need to develop is their own judgment of what works and what does not work in their own teaching. I found the way to make learning English more enjoyable for my students. I hope this article will help teachers to create their own trips to any parts of the world with the help of TBLT. | |
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Среда, 2024-11-20, 1:40 PM
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