Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 51

Task-based language learning and is considered to be a category of
communicative language teaching as it has its origins in it. In my opinion, teachers
follow the task-based principles for language learning taking into consideration
some reasons, turning it into an instrument to make the students use the language
in a really communicative way, rather than the communication that results from
classroom activities which have no direct connection to real-life situations. Other
educators, like Prabhu in the Bangalore Project, thought that tasks “were a way of
tapping into learners' natural mechanisms for second-language acquisition”, and
weren't concerned with real-life communication by itself.
By interacting with others, students have the opportunity to listen to language
which may be beyond their present ability, but which may be assimilated into their
knowledge of the target language for use at a later time. In this respect Candlin
and Murphy (1987:1) note, “the central purpose we are concerned with is language
learning and task present this in the form of a problem-solving negotiation between
knowledge that the learner holds and new knowledge.” All in all, TBL is language
learning by doing.
Activities in a lesson are generally organised into stages, according to what their
role is in the teaching-learning process. In case of a language lesson, a traditional
model for the planning has been the PPP approach (Presentation, Practice,
Production). Using this model, the teacher firstly presents the individual language
items (for example, the present simple structures), followed by the practice in the
form of spoken and written activities (often pattern drills), and then used by the
learners freely, in speaking or writing exercises. Despite the fact that the grammar
point chosen for this procedure may well correspond accurately with a grammatical
syllabus, this approach is frequently criticized for its apparent unpredictability of the
selected grammar structure, which is possible not to meet the linguistic needs of
the learners, and the fact that the production stage is often based on a rather
inauthentic emphasis on the chosen structure. There is a description of the way a
PPP lesson would proceed.
In the first stage, Presentation, the teacher presents the context and situation for
the language (e.g. describing a robot), and both explain and demonstrate the
meaning and form of the new language (e.g. “can” and “cannot”). Students are
then asked to complete a controlled practice stage, where they are asked to make
sentences, match halves of sentences, or fill gaps. This stage of the lesson
demands that the students use the language in a correct manner, but it can help
them feel more comfortable when using it.
Finally, they go on to the production stage, in which the students can speak more
freely about themselves (e.g. “I can speak English, but I cannot speak German.”),
or about other people in the real world (“My mother can/cannot drive.”). The PPP
approach is more effective for teaching basic language at lower levels.
There may be some problems with the PPP approach:
- the teacher may feel that the students are able to deal with the new language
when producing structures accurately in the class. Surprisingly, after a few
lessons, students may feel uncomfortable to producing the language correctly or
even they may not produce it at all.
51