Facilitating Output and Interaction through Task-Based Language Teaching

Abstract

There are innumerable methodologies linked with instructed LT, each of which are based on whatever theoretical SLA rationale a researcher or teacher should fancy at a given time. In line with recent trends regarding learner-focused instruction and emphasis on communication and interaction, there has been a shift away from traditional teaching approaches linked with a structural linguistic syllabus. While one would be hard pressed to call the likes of Long’s interaction hypothesis (1996) and Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis (1985) ‘recent’ by any means, they remain relevant through the emergence of avant garde teaching approaches such as Task-Based Language Teaching, or TBLT for short. TBLT, with is focus on form (Long, 1991), aims to better facilitate output and interaction than traditional focus on forms (Long, 1996) approaches. However, whether the task-design of TBLT is actually able to out-perform traditional teaching in terms of output and interaction is a scarcely researched topic. Quite contrary, existing research seem in-part to indicate that TBLT, and classroom tasks in general, is not facilitative of negotiation for meaning (Foster, 1998, p. 18), and that it is not motivating for pupils (Poupore, 2013, p. 105-109). As such I have conducted this study, with a corpus analysis as its basis, aimed to test to which degree task within a TBLT framework is able to motivate quantity and quality of L2 production, interaction, and negotiation for meaning. Overall, the positive findings remain that the participants in my study universally found the TBLT tasks to be more motivating than the traditional tasks and interacted more during them. In addition, the participants had an overall far greater degree of total output, and a somewhat more complex lexicon in the TBLT tasks. Conversely, the significant negative finding was that negotiation for meaning was by and large absent when the participants solved both the traditional and TBLT tasks, suggesting that interaction is not sufficient to facilitate negotiations.