Transcription
Is it a great learning experience and a lot of innovation, and there is a lot more that we can do?
Task-based language teaching, as an approach for language learning, where students are given a task or an objective, a goal that they have to meet at the end of the class. So, at the center of task-based language teaching is meaning.
When I was doing my degree, I heard about task-based, but I never implemented it. And I thought, you know, I could totally learn that from him. So then I was like, "Hey, do you like this approach?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah, we should do it!" And then we figured, you know, we could implement task-based language teaching in the classroom. But we need a team.
We had a total of three mentors, and it was great to have the guidance from the three of them because we could see different examples, different models, right? Typically, a strong base language teaching approach starts with a needs analysis. It's kind of probing, "What do your students need to do with language? What do they want to do with language?" We want to kind of provide students with tasks that help them in the real world and that build the proficiency that they need to do everything that they want to do in the real world.
We were noticing they were going through all of the levels, they go through all the motions, they do all the fill-in-the-blank activities. But at the end of the day, they get to the fourth semester of Spanish and they're still having trouble relating to the language, understanding that the language is more than just the words on the page, or just the fill-in-the-blank activities. Speaking Spanish.
So we need to use language with a purpose. It has to have some meaning in it, whether it's using language to order coffee at a coffee shop, whether it is to buy a plane ticket using a platform in the language that you're learning, whether it's - you're in a job interview and you need to use the language for that, or you need to go grocery shopping. These are the meaningful parts of language. And so this is where task-based language teaching comes into play. Speaking Spanish.
We also had a team of materials creation because there's a lot of work that comes into creating the material. We had a chapter, and the chapter was of a clothing, and instead of having the students go through a very long list of vocab and learn the pieces of clothing, we decided to do something more interactive. So the final outcome was that they will get a request from a potential buyer and they had to find a clothing item that matches the description. Just seeing them go through all of the pile of clothes and try to decide - match the word that they had learned with the actual item, and that that physical connection between the actual language and the item in the real world was was a really nice thing to see.
And from the instructor's perspective, it was a task in itself finding the clothes at the thrift shop. I mean, that was the fun part. We had styles for somebody, a formal person, somebody who wants to stay at home all the time. Yes. Someone who was going to a 4th of July party. Oh, yes! The 4th of July party! (laughs). And students did very good. The 4th of July was very straightforward. But there's always some wonderful madness. Let me put it like this - wonderful craziness going on in the classroom. Some energy, some vibes. And I think the teachers picked up on that, and it might have been just the innovation effect, but I felt like there is something that we really speak towards. Students want to do what they are motivated and engaged to do in a classroom.
So through task-based language teaching, I have relearned completely how to structure a lesson. I was always bound by the Present, Practice, Produce method that I was taught when I was learning to become a teacher. And now it's been over a decade, and now I'm restructuring the way that I plan classes. And yes, it takes more time, it takes more planning, it takes a ton of creativity. But then it's so rewarding once you go into the classroom and you carry out that task, and then you see the students working on it, and you see them succeeding at it, and it really gives you a sense of like, "Oh, that's why I'm doing this. So this is what teaching is like. This is what teaching should be."