Class Sept. 20th, 2011

Task-Based Teaching is a fine idea, sure, and one worth a few implementations in the classroom to continue with a eclectic approach to teaching. It definitely has merit; when learners are invested in everything that goes into their education in a classroom then they're bound to get something more out of that educational opportunity than if someone were just lecturing from the front of the class. Indeed, I think it's a fine idea that could really help students with their grasp of any language. Putting them in familiar groups so that they can work together to achieve better fluency is an even more fantastic idea. The only problem I have is that this success depends entirely on how much a student puts into the project (or what-have-you) before, during, and after its completion.

I'm not saying that this is a complete failure of the Task-Based approach, but it's certainly a sizable hiccup. The whole process depends on learners to get out of it everything and more than they put into it, and I think this is placing too much emphasis on the assumed intrinsically motivating nature of several tasks (micro- or macro-) involved in this particular approach. Students have a lot going on. They have several classes each year that demand their complete and full attention, which basically means that their attention is inevitably divided between the necessities and the simplicities. The necessities become dangerous when not attended to, and some students see that in the form of tests and rote memorization, while tasks they might figure that they can just, "pick up on the fly." I say this because this was me in high school, as well as all of my friends, and then even the people I wasn't friends with. My indifference to the other population only clouds my data with obscurity, but I'm pretty sure that's the main principle on which an American school runs. Also, one has to take into account whether a student might want to do work or not. One bad apple might corrupt the task-based experience for an entire group.

I'm not saying that this is a terrible way to look at teaching. I'm just saying that there's no way to make an ideal condition in which it will work always- the basic underlying problem with method, and the one bane of our teaching that we keep coming back to. Certainly this approach has several applications in a progressive and successful classroom. But we needn't get carried away with thoughts of its effectiveness until we've tried it for ourselves, in our own individual classrooms.