A TBL Attempt

Lately, I have been trying to put the theory of Task Based Learning to practice in my classes. I can say it is not an easy thing to do when you are used to a "fail-safe" approach. Well, at least so I thought.

I have been using ideas mainly from Jane and Dave Willis, who have comprehensively contributed to the area. For them, especially Jane, a task is "a goal-oriented communicative activity with a specific outcome, where the emphasis is on exchanging meanings not producing specific language forms". Just perfect!

I have a group of teenagers on Mondays and Wednesdays and that is the group I am trying to make the shift from PPP to TBL. Students age range from 11 to 15 years old and very different interests and personalities, not to mention motivation. Most of them are false beginners, with a little knowledge of the language, but there are some real beginners, which make the lessons much more challenging.

In our previous lesson last Monday, which was based in two texts students were supposed to read and answer some questions, I tried to use the TBL approach to see the results. Here is what I did and my reflections:

I started off by checking homework. After that, I started one of the topics of the lesson by saying that U2 is my favorite band and then I asked the students if they knew where the band is from. Then I asked what their favorite band is and if they knew where the members are from.

After their contributions (most of them didn't know where the members of the band were from or didn't even have a favorite band), I wrote One World on the board and told the students that they are a pop band and the four members of the band are from four different countries but their language is English.

The task they had to do in pairs (which ended up being done in small groups due to some students' absence), was to write down five questions they thought would be answered in the text they were about to read. Failure! The students took a while to understand what they were supposed to do, but in the end they came up with very basic questions like "What's your first/last name?", "Where are you from?". That was not what I was expecting, but at least they tried.

After a long time, they shared questions. According to the TBL framework, after the task, students are to plan and report about the task. I saw this was not going to be possible with that group at that time. So I asked them to open their books and read the text to find answers to their questions. Few were answered. After that I was supposed to have asked students to prepare seven quiz questions to give the other group to answer from memory. I didn't do that because they spent a long time reading the text.

Finally, I asked students to answer the questions in their books, first about the text then about themselves. Again, it took a while because there are some students with sentence formation problems, which I must act on soon in order to avoid future biggest problems.

Well, that was only part of the lesson I taught that day which I would like to share here. Any ideas will be welcome now. Take the chance to write about one of your lessons.

Wow! That was a huge post! :)

See you soon!