Roll up! Roll up! Here we go again!

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TBLT: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

The fifth run of our online TBLT course starts on 24th January 2024 and subscription is now open! Our last course was the busiest and best so far and we aim to top it in 2024. It’s a 100-hour, online tutored course aimed at

  • classroom teachersurse designers,
  • teacher-trainers,
  • directors of studies and
  • materials writers,

all of whom have an interest in upgrading their knowledge of this evidence-backed communicative approach with an eye to designing and implementing dynamic language courses based on relevant and engaging tasks.

The popularity of TBLT as an approach to language teaching is a response to a growing dissatisfaction among EFL professionals with current ELT practice. As convenient as coursebook-driven courses might be, they frequently fail to deliver the improvement that students hope for. TBLT focuses on meaning-making and engagement with real-world language needs; the courses give experienced teachers fresh opportunities to re-engage with their practice, they offer new teachers a more challenging, much more rewarding framework for their work, and they allow students to learn through scaffolded use of the language (learning by doing), which, as we know from evidence from research, is the best way to learn an L2.

The vibrancy of TBLT is evidenced by animated discussions on social media, by increasing presentations at conferences (including the biennial International Conference on TBLT), by the recently-formed International Association of TBLT (IATBLT), and by the wave of new publications, including thousands of journal articles, special issues in prominent journals, and the new journal specifically dedicated to the topic, TASK: Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning, the first volume of which appeared in 2021.

The Course

Our SLB course tries to “walk the talk” by working through a series of tasks relating to key aspects of TBLT, from needs analysis through syllabus and material design to classroom delivery and assessment. While we are influenced by Long’s particular version of TBLT, we also explore lighter, more feasible versions of TBLT which can be adopted by smaller schools or individual teachers working with groups with specific needs.

 

Neil McMillan (president of SLF) and myself (both experienced teachers with PhDs) do most of the tutoring, but we are privileged to be assisted by

Roger Gilabert: An expert on TBLT, Roger worked with Mike Long on several projects and has developed a TBLT course for Catalan journalists. His contributions to our four previous courses have been extremely highly rated by participants.

Marta González-Lloret: Marta did her PhD with Mike Long at the University of Hawai’i, is currently book series co-editor of Task-Based Language Teaching. Issues, Research and Practice, Benjamins, and is especially interested in using technology-mediated tasks. Marta has worked with Neil to strengthen Modules 3 & 4 and in this course; she will again give presentations, participate in a videoconferernce, and in the forums. As with Roger, she is a favorite with our participants.

The Modules

The whole course takes 100 hours and consists of five modules. You can choose individual modules or the whole course. If you choose to do one or two individual modules, you’ll have the chance to do further modules in later courses to achieve complete certification.

The 5 modules are:

  • Presenting TBLT
  • Designing a TBLT Needs Analysis
  • Designing a task-based pedagogic unit
  • Task-Based Materials:
  • Facilitating and evaluating tasks

Each module consists of:

  • Background reading.
  • A video presentation from the session tutor and/or guest tutors.
  • Interactive exercises to explore key concepts.
  • An on-going forum discussion with the tutors, guest tutors and fellow course participants.
  • An extensive group videoconference session with the tutors and/or guest tutors.
  • An assessed task (e.g. short essay, presentation, task analysis etc.).

The key text is Mike Long’s 2015 classic “SLA and Task-Based Language Teaching”. We are greatly indebted to Mike for his help and guidance, and in this course we’ll look closely at his strong version of TBLT, his materials, his ideas about “modified, elaborated texts”, and videos of presentations and videoconferences he made in previous courses.

More Flexible approach to TBLT

Thanks to the truly impressive work of the participants in the four previous courses, we’ve learned a lot about the problems of implementing a full version of Long’s TBLT, and we now better appreciate the need for a flexible case-by-case approach to the design and implementation of any TBLT project.

In the third  and fourth courses, Neil’s careful re-organisation and tweaking of the moules made it increasingly possible for each participant to slowly develop their own TBLT agenda, working on identifying their own target tasks, breaking these down into relevant pedagogic tasks, finding suitable materials, and bringing all this together using the most appropriate pedagogic procedures.

Another gratifying aspect of all the courses is the way participants learn from each other; most of the individual participant’s TBLT models contain common elements which were slowly forged from the forum discussions.

So in this course, we’ll make even more effort to ensure that each participant works in accord with their own teaching context, and at the same time contributes to the pooled knowledge and expertise of the group.

Sneak Preview

To get more information about the course, and try out a “taster” CLICK HERE

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