A Review on Task-based Language Teaching

Shuguang Zhang
2018 Proceedings of the 2017 7th International Conference on Education and Management (ICEM 2017)   unpublished
The construct of task has become so universal as to turn it into one of the best-validated terms in second language acquisition (SLA). Task has become the fulfillment of an evolving disciplinary agreement with an emphasis on meaning. Both teachers and students have been aware of linguistic form in language pedagogy, interaction and in the methodology of task-based language teaching. Task-based teaching is considered as an effective way to draw students' attention to form, function and meaning.
more » ... hese ideas have been categorized below to establish the issues, to describe the definitions of tasks, to illustrate the criteria features of tasks, and to discuss the implementation of task-based language teaching. Definition of Tasks In term of definitions of tasks, we find that the term has been defined in a variety of ways in general education, from within the field of second language teaching, to other fields for pedagogic and psycholinguistic reasons. There is now a general consensus that the task is meaning-focused rather than form-focused [1, 2, 3, 4]. Long [1] defined task as "a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some reward", and it means "the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, or in between". This definition is non-technical and non-linguistic. In fact, it describes the sorts of things that non-linguists would tell you they do if they were to be asked. Richards, Platt and Weber [2] take tasks from a pedagogical perspective. A task is "an activity or action which is carried out as the result of processing or understanding language". The use of tasks in language teaching is to "make language teaching more communicative". Tasks are defined in terms of what the learner will do in the classroom rather than in the outside world. Breen [3] circumscribes task as "any structured language learning endeavor which has a particular objective, appropriate content, a specified working procedure, and a range of outcomes for those who undertake the task". He implies that tasks involve communicative language use in which the learners' attention is focused on meaning instead of linguistic structure. Similarly, Long mentions filling out a form, making an airline reservation, etc; Richards et al. refer to drawing a map, and listening to an instruction and carrying out a command, which shares the same implications with Breen. In similar fashion, Nunan [4] considers the communicative task as "a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language". In similar fashion, he emphasizes that the learners' attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. What's more, he claims that the task should have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and an end. In this article, I prefer that a task is an activity that learners engage in to further the process of learning a language.
doi:10.2991/icem-17.2018.54 fatcat:wz44rl3ae5d6xghz3jgh4rz7m4