Task Based Learning (aka Task-Based Instruction) 

Centro Colombo Americano In-Service Training

January 15, 2009 

 Sources: Willis, J. (1996). A Framework for Task-Based Learning. England, UK: Pearson Education; Lindsay, C. & Knight, P. (2006). Learning and Teaching English. Oxford, NY: Oxford University.

  What are Tasks?  

• Activities where the target language is used by the learner for a communicative purpose in order to achieve an outcome.  These activities focus on the process of communicating by setting tasks for the learner to complete using the target language. 
• All tasks should have an outcome. Tasks could be anything from an information gap to problem-solving.
• The challenge of achieving that outcome is what makes TBL motivating. Students can use their full range of skills and language at the same time, rather than in discrete units as sometimes happens with CLT.
• An example of an activity that lacks an outcome would be to show students a picture and say Write four sentences describing the picture. Say them to your partner.  Here, there is no communicative purpose, only the practice of the language form. 

6 Types of Tasks

1. Listing. Generates talk as learners explain their ideas. Processes involved include brainstorming, where learners draw on their own knowledge and experience either as a class or in groups, and fact-finding, where learners find out things about each other or others. 
2. Ordering and sorting. Involves four main processes: (1) sequencing items, actions, or events in a logical order, (2) ranking items according to personal values or a specified criteria, (3) categorizing items in given groups, and (4) classifying items in different ways, where the categories themselves are not given. 
3. Comparing. Involve comparing information of a similar nature but from different sources or versions in order to identify common points and/or differences.  Processes involved include matching, finding similarities, and finding differences. 
4. Problem-solving. Make demands upon people’s intellectual and reasoning powers, and by providing a challenge, are engaging and often satisfying to solve. 
5. Sharing personal experiences
6. Creative tasks. These are often called projects and involve pairs or groups of learners in some kind of freer creative work.  They also tend to have more steps/stages than tasks, and can involve a combination of task types.  Organizational skills and team-work are important in getting the task done. 

 Starting Points for Tasks

Personal knowledge and experience: Many tasks are based on the learner’s personal and professional experience and knowledge of the world. 

 Problems: The starting point in normally the statement of the problem.

 Visual Stimuli: Tasks can be based on pictures, photographs, tables, graphs, etc. 

 Spoken and written texts: Recordings of spoken English, extracts from videos, and reading texts can make good task material.  An example of a task here would be to read or listen to the first part of a story, and given a few additional clues, discuss or write an ending. 

Children’s activities: Action games, miming and guessing, and popular playground games are effective with young learners.

Pre-Task Language Activities

Pre-task activities to explore topic language should actively involve all learners, give them relevant exposure, and create interest in doing a task on this topic. They provide support for complex tasks and activate schemata, as well as present new vocabulary, grammar, and language functions that the learners will need to complete the task.

Example activities

a.    Classifying words and phrases: think of ways to categorize

b.    Odd One Out: write sets of related words or phrases on the board, inserting one item into each set that doesn’t fit.

c.     Matching phrases to pictures 

d.    Memory Challenge: same as matching, only you take the pictures down after 1-2 minutes, and the learners must match the phrases or captions to the pictures from memory. 

e.    Brainstorming and mind maps

Adapting Textbook Materials to TBI

Opportunities for task-based learning can happen by making small changes in the way the textbook materials are used.

• Change class management.  Switch from whole class to group activities.
•   Change the order of activities.
• Change the balance of study in certain sections of the text.

 The Task-based Framework

 Diagram from: 

http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/best%20of%20bilash/taskbasedlanguageteaching.html