Date: Saturday, October 05, 2024 9:00 AM - Sunday, October 13, 2024 12:00 PM
Location: Online Live

Classroom Perspectives on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT): ‘Nonissues and Real Issues’ Revisited

ENES 8655: SEMINAR 1

Professor:  Dr. Jonathan Newton (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

Credit hours:  1 credit hour

Schedule:  3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days

  • Saturday, October 5 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST)
  • Sunday, October 6 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
  • Saturday, October 12 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
  • Sunday, October 13 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. 

This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, October 5, Sunday, October 6, Saturday, October 12, and Sunday, October 13 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 13:00 on Saturday, October 5.

The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, October 5 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The sign-up process must be completed through "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, October 4, at 12:00 p.m. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, October 4.

In recent decades, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been adopted to various degrees in contexts where more traditional teaching methods have been or still are widely used. Reflecting the spread of TBLT (and resistance to it), a growing body of research has investigated the implementation of TBLT in diverse contexts, focusing especially on the cognition and experience of teachers. This seminar will draw on this research to critically evaluate TBLT as a researched pedagogy ‘from the bottom up’. This seminar’s focus will be on TBLT in Asian EFL classroom contexts from primary school to tertiary-level EFL. It will examine how teachers in these classroom studies have made sense of, adopted and/or adapted tasks, the contextual affordances and constraints that have informed their decision making, and the reported impact of TBLT on teaching (and teachers), engagement, and learning (and learners).

The title of this lecture series borrows in part from a 2016 article by Michael Long called, ‘In Defence of Tasks and TBLT: Nonissues and Real Issues’. In this piece, Long distinguished between what he saw as, on the one hand, ‘nonissues’ or misconceptions of TBLT (e.g., The role of the teacher is downgraded in TBLT, and TBLT neglects grammar) and, on the other hand, ‘real issues’ (e.g., how can they grade task complexity, and does performance on one task transfer to another). A selection of these issues will be re-examined in this seminar in the light of TBLT research and scholarship since 2016. In addition, This seminar will go beyond the issues raised by long, teasing out common themes from recent research but also drawing on the pressing questions and practical concerns (and accomplishments) of practitioners who will participating in this seminar.

Open to the Public

This seminar is open to the public, with first three hours for free.

How to attend the seminarSeminar Sign Up Form