A workshop on Task Based Language Teaching- Dr. Rod Ellis

What is a task?

It is a language activity that embraces 4 criteria:

1- Focus on meaning and not on structure and forms.

2- The activity should have some kind of gap; an information gap (closed outcome) or an opinion gap (open outcome).

3- Allowing students to choose the linguistic and non-linguistic resources.

4- The activity should clearly defines a communicative outcome-communicative purpose

How to use a task in language teaching? Two ways offered by Dr. Ellis

1- Task supported language teaching: Present -Practice-Produce (PPP)-The language needed to produce a certain task is presented and practiced.  

2- Task based language teaching: You don't know what language you're teaching, you don't know what language learners are learning and therefore the previous way is preferred by teachers.

Conclusion