Task-Based Language Education

Book excerpt: Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been attracting the attention of researchers, curriculum developers, teacher trainers and language teachers for many years. However, much of the available literature and research has been from a psycholinguistic perspective, driven by the desire to understand how people acquire a second language. Far less research has been carried out as to whether TBLT works for real teachers and real learners in a classroom environment. This book aims to offer a unique contribution by uniting a discussion of task-based pedagogical principles with descriptions of their application to real life language education problems. It provides an account of the many challenges and obstacles that the implementation of TBLT raises and discusses the different options for overcoming them. The book contains a substantial body of research from Flanders, where the implementation of TBLT has been a nationwide project for fifteen years in primary, secondary and adult education.