Task based learning in communicative foreign language teaching

Abstract

The objective of the article is to present two methodologies for the use of the task based learning approach in communicative foreign language teaching, as well as to offer the advantages of this approach vs the traditional Presentation-Practice and Production methodology. The article was written after a deep bibliographic review and after it was put into practice in the authors’ teaching learning processes. With the use of this approach, the students begin the communicative task using the language they have learned in previous lessons or in other sources of information. Then, they speak or write about the way they did the task and compare their findings. At a certain point they can listen to recordings of other doing the same or a similar task or they can read something related to the topic or relate this with their experience in doing the task. After the task is done and reported, then, attention is guided towards specific aspects of language form. Aspects that occur naturally in the recordings they have listed to or in the texts they have read.