Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Winner - British Council Innovation in English Language Teaching Award 2006 This book was written for language teachers by language teachers, with a view to encouraging readers to use more tasks in their lessons, and to explore for themselves various aspects of task-based teaching and learning. It gives insights into ways in which tasks can be designed, adapted and implemented in a range of teaching contexts and illustrates ways in which tasks and task-based learning can be investigated as a research activity. Practising language teachers and student professionals on MA TESOL/Applied Linguistics courses will find this a rich resource of varied experience in the classroom and a stimulus to their own qualitative studies.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• About the Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Aims and Explorations into Tasks and Task-based Teaching
• Task-based Language Learning and Teaching: Theories and Applications
• Part 1 Implementing Task-Based Learning: Contexts And Purposes
• Developing from PPP to TBL: A Focused Grammar Task
• Integrating Task-based Learning Into a Business English Programme
• Language as Topic: Learner-teacher Investigation of Concordances
• Storytelling with Low Level Learners: Developing Narrative Tasks
• Adding Tasks to Textbooks for Beginner Learners
• Using Language-focused Learning Journals on a Task-based Course
• Part 2 Exploring Task Interaction: Helping Learners Do Better
• Exam-oriented Tasks: Transcripts, Turn-Taking and Backchanelling
• Training Young Learners in Meaning Negotiation Skills: Does it Help?
• Task Repetition with 10-year-old Children
• Collaborative Tasks for Cross-cultural Communication
• Part 3 Exploring Task Language: Lexical Phrases And Patterns
• Interactive Lexical Phrases in Pair Interview Tasks
• Multi-word Chunks in Oral Tasks
• Can We Predict Language Items for Open Tasks?
• Part 4 Investigating Variables: Task Conditions And Task Types
• Fighting Fossilization: Language at the Task Versus Report Stages
• Story-telling: Effects of Planning, Repetition and Context
• The Effect of Pre-task Planning Time on Task-based Performance
• Balancing Fluency, Accuracy and Complexity Through Task Characteristics
• Quality Interaction and Types of Negotiation in Problem-solving and Jigsaw Tasks
• Epilogue: Teachers Exploring Research
• References
• Index