Module 4, Task 1: The Teacher's Dilemma

 


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The Teacher's Dilemma (10 minutes)



Watch the video of two experienced teacher educators describing the challenges teachers encounter when implementing task-based grammar teaching for the first time. Click HERE Download HERE to download the transcript.

 

If you are having trouble viewing this video, or you would like to download it, click hereLinks to an external site..

Transcript:

Radmila: Hello and welcome to Module 4. I'm talking with Dr. Kara McBride, education specialist with World Learning. Kara, you trained many teachers to use task-based learning. Recently, I’ve run a survey asking teachers new to this approach to tell me what they think about it. Here are some of the most frequent responses:

  • It’s a nice idea, but it is time consuming, and we have to teach with the set curriculum.
  • It’s difficult to implement it with beginners and large classes.
  • I’m not disagreeing with the increased percentage of students’ involvement but the percentage of teacher’s involvement is less and it worries me. How will I make sure that students learn and understand new grammar?

Would you say that these responses are typical?

Kara: Yes, I think they're pretty typical. TBT (Task-based teaching) is a relatively new idea, and as with all new ideas, there's some resistance. I think one problem is just understanding the word 'task' and the interpretations ‘task’. For example, 'task' in some languages, ‘means ‘homework’. Also, there's some confusion - a TBT task isn't the same as a communicative task, such as role plays or debates. Usually you'll do a role play or a debate at the end of a lesson so that the students can use the target grammar structure in context; in TBT, the students' goal is some non-linguistic activity such as making a brochure, or preparing a presentation, or solving a problem. So what they do is they use the language to achieve that goal. Another issue that comes up a lot is that the structure of a lesson for TBT is very different from this teacher's previous experience. In their previous experience, they've probably had a lesson that starts with explicit grammar instructions.

Radmila: What would you recommend to teachers who are about to start exploring how to teach grammar using task-based learning?

Kara: You really need to look at both the benefits and the problems. A lot of teachers when they start, they really just focus on the disadvantages, but it's important to move beyond that and really look at what are some of the potential advantages of task-based teaching. It can really enrich your teaching repertoire; you should give it a try.

Radmila: You should give it a try. Let's look at Module 4.

 

 

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