Page 131 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

115 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Perspectives and Challenges of EFL Teachers in a Task Based

Language Teaching (TBLT) Curriculum

M. Martha Lengeling

Edgar Emmanuell García Ponce
Irasema Mora Pablo

Universidad de Guanajuato

Key words: perspectives, qualitative research, task based learning teaching.

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has a long history which is connected to the Communicative
Language Teaching approach. The basis for TBLT is the use of authentic tasks for learners to carry
out in the target language. These tasks should also be meaningful for learners within their contexts.
With this in mind, grammar takes on an inductive role where learners are given tasks to figure out
how to use the language. This research project was carried out with two sets of teacher training
workshops (20 hours each), and the main objective was to explore the perspective of EFL teachers
who teach in a TBLT curriculum in a large public university in southern Mexico. The training was on
TBLT and we wanted to see how the teachers responded to the training and what challenges they
encountered as teachers.

Literature Review

TBLT has a rich history which stems from Communicative Language Teaching in the 70s (Willis,
1996). TBLT is also linked to second language acquisition in that the learner is more engaged in the
process of learning and in figuring out the grammar (Ellis, 2003, 2009; Thornbury, 1999; Zhao, 2015).
TBLT looks at grammar inductively, that is, the learner tries to figure out how to use the language
without grammar rules given (Noonan, 2004; Thornbury, 1999). A variety of authentic tasks are used
in TBLT and examples of these are information gaps, projects, noticing activities, presentations, sim-
ulations, etc. Planning is important for TBLT and the teacher needs to consider pre-task, task and
post-task stages, as well as the roles of teachers and learners (Willis, 1996). The curriculum for the
context was grounded on TBLT.