I’ve just watched the plenary that Neil McMillan gave in the morning of the final day of #IATEFL2025. I’d attended live Catherine Walter’s plenary session on what has changed in 50 years as that is very much the same timeframe that I have lived through. I’ll watch the other plenaries later on.
Task Based Language Teaching has always been a hard-sell even among people who see the logic of it, maybe because it isn’t as easy as that to actually do for the many reasons Neill outlined. One of the reasons is that it’s much easier to use English File, which is so packed with exercises and other material that the teacher will never run out of material instead of choosing a task-based curriculum and persuading students, parents, colleagues and bosses that you haven’t lost your mind as well as your way!
Research is very much a university thing so it is difficult
to find research papers about the use of tasks in language schools and even
harder to find them used in secondary or primary schools. Lack of research
though isn’t the only obstacle: a much bigger one is the fact that there are
very few commercially produced materials that are based on TBLT and equally few
databases of tasks for teachers to draw on. There are two, provided by Neill: https://www.iatblt.org/resources
Just as I was noting, “Please can we have more examples of
tasks that could form part of a TBLT course or that could be a task based on a
standard coursebook. We are at the half way point in the talk!” Neill provided
one that would not have showed up on anyone’s needs analysis! How to solve ‘the
problem of alligators in the Underground of New York’
The task could be done in small groups with groups comparing
solutions and learning from each other, but some sort of monologue outlining
the planned solution(s) seems to me inevitable as the final part of the task.
This could and should be recorded.
Neill included in the list of possible Post-task options, ‘Discuss
and Correct errors collected by the teacher’ and ‘Transcribe and analyse
transcriptions: what could I have said better?’
We all try to relate what we hear in presentations to our
own situations and our own ideas, so I jumped on these two post-task activities
as being exactly what my 9-step prompt for ChatGPT aims to do: to work on
errors (Steps 1-3) and suggest better ways to say the same thing (Steps 4-9).
Steps 3, 5, 7 & 9 are all there to allow students to listen to the improved
version, so there are really only 5 steps:
- Identify errors
- Correct errors
- Suggest improvements at the student's current level
- Suggest improvements at a slightly higher level
- Suggest improvements at an even higher level
