My colleague Johann has been working on a system which uses picture cards to encourage speaking. It’s called Go’n'Talk and the site has a couple of other things that may interest teachers who are looking for a textbook free lesson activity or want to supplement their textbooks.

The cards have 15 topics and cover high frequency situations and can be used in a variety of ways.

Worth a look!

I can see some similarities between a webquest and task based learning – but it seems that mainly webquests are developed for native speakers. This page has a massive list of resources for EFL teachers wanting to get some ideas for webquests.

This page has a great introduction to webquests for ESL teaching with some good references and some sound justifications for using it to teach not only English but higher order thinking skills as described for example in Bloom’s taxonomy.

My first stab at creating a simple webquest for Japanese Junior High School students can be seen below. You can download the PDF here.

It comprises a country outline and several things to find out, for example language, famous place etc. Students then have to search using google or wikipedia to find the answers and also draw the flag.

When I tried this in my classroom recently I was surprised how engaged students were – not one hopped over to youtube! There was  a fair amount of excitement as well at being able to be in charge of their own learning and trying to work out all the English that was coming up.

I am very interested by the potential of webquests and will be developing some more which also incorporate a tblt approach and which support beginner and young learners as much as possible.

I’ve made eight pages of 20 question crosswords in a format that I hope is interesting to younger students, and at a level that is at just the right difficulty for them.

These crosswords are suitable for 11-15 year olds at the beginner level with about 200 words of vocab. I use these in my Junior High School grade 1 and 2 classes and they are always a big hit.

Feel free to download the pdf and use in your own classes – they are a great way to get students thinking hard through English

English Crosswords for Beginners (pdf).

Here are some other crosswords I use a lot.

Research into vocabulary learning has found that Semantic Category Effects (SCE) (HakkiErten and Tekin, 2008; Finkbeiner and Nicol, 2003) hinder retention when words are learnt in semantically related categories. Other variables such as a word’s concreteness and word class have also been found to change learnability. In this study young Japanese learners (n82, average age 12) were tested to see what effect manipulating Concreteness, Syntactic Class and Semantic Relationship had on learnability. Statistical analysis showed that previous studies’ predictions about the effect of each variable had on learnability were generally confirmed.

How do Semantic Category Effects, Words of Different Levels of Concreteness and Syntactic Class Affect Vocabulary Retention in Young Asian EFL Learners

Proposal for course materials

The role of interest in motivating 12-16 year old learners of English in Japan

The Eclectic Teacher – Approaches and Materials for a Teaching Context in Japan

Hear All About It Teaching Listening Strategies and Current Events through CNN News

How do Semantic Category Effects, Words of Different Levels of Concreteness and Syntactic Class Affect Vocabulary Retention in Young Asian EFL Learners (Research Dissertation).

Wiley Blevins was sat on a plane headed to South America to teach English when he was suddenly struck with the huge responsibility this job carried – that of teaching children to read and thus open the door to economic independence and cultural awareness and freedom.

He immediately set about learning as much as possible about the most effect way to teach reading for English language learners and Phonics from A to Z is the result of many years of study and practice in many different classrooms.

He starts with an introduction to reading and English, give erudite rationales for the efficacy of phonics instruction. This is followed by several chapters of very useful examples and lists of words which illustrate the phonics method and provide sample lessons and ideas for making effective phonics lessons.

He also shares the benefits of his experience, pointing out where kids have problems and how to anticipate and resolve them before problems set in.

In short, this book is probably the best value and most useful book on phonics available for teachers around today. Highly practical and also well supported with research but presented in a friendly and clear manner you’ll soon not only understand what phonics is all about, but be confident enough to develop your own materials and create interesting empowering learning sessions that will greatly benefit your students.

Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is an approach which offers students material which they have to actively engage in the processing of in order to achieve a goal or complete a task. Much like regular tasks that we perform everyday such as making the tea, writing an essay, talking to someone on the phone, TBLT seeks to develop students’ interlanguage through providing a task and then using language to solve it.

Here are some of the main features of TBLT:

• meaning is primary
• there is some communication problem to solve
• there is some sort of relationship to comparable real world activities
• task completion has some priority
• the assessment is done in terms of outcomes

On the other hand, tasks:

• do not give learners other people’s meanings to regurgitate
• are not concerned with language display
• are not conformity oriented
• are not practice oriented
• do not embed language in materials so that specific structures can be focused on

Which leads to some examples of tasks:

• completing one another’s family tree
• agreeing on advice to give the writer of a letter to an agony aunt
• solving a riddle
• leaving a message on someone’s answering machine

but which rule out:

• completing a transformation exercise
• most Q and A with a teacher
• inductive learning activities where preselected material is conducive to the
• generation of language rules

(From Skehan, 1998 A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning).

From this we can see that tasks focus on form (rather than individual forms of many separate structures) and that learners have to actively negotiate meaning and produce communication to complete the task.

Skehan’s list offers some exciting and fun possibilities. When I introduce tasks such as solving a crossword and then getting the students to make their own and then share it with each other, or read about a topic and watch a related video clip, students become engaged with language and meaning as well as intensive cognitive processing which, I believe, induces interlanguage modification and development.

While students in my context in Japan are somewhat hesitant to engage or develop conversation skills in a school classroom, they are more than happy to take their knowledge and apply it to various tasks. However, even when they are required to speak given a task based approach they generally are eager to try and complete the task and perform it in front of others!

In short, TBLT is an approach which seeks to allow students to work somewhat at their own pace and within their own level and area of interest to process and restructure their interlanguage. It moves away from a prescribed developmental sequence and introduces learner freedom and autonomy into the learning process. The teacher’s role is also modified to that of helper.

Find and buy books on task based language teaching

This site is a resource for all teachers interested in using Task Based Language Teaching as an approach to teaching whatever language you teach.

I graduated from an  MA in TESOL at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, and have been teaching English in Japan for six years. I’m also learning Japanese to help integrate here, but also to experience the frustrations and thrills of second language learning (my high school French was long ago consigned to the bin, but strangely enough when I started learning Japanese I kept speaking bits of French – weird!).

Anyways, I’m making and posting the materials I produce for my Junior and Senior  High School students here in Japan so please feel free to download and modify – and repost improved versions!

There is a nascent forum to discuss your experiences with TBLT and help all teachers worldwide interested in this to develop and improve materials and methods.

If you have any questions or problems registering then please email me with the contact form.

Cheers
Keith