 My name is A. Deligan and I'm just going to explain a little bit about myself before I begin. I'm an English language teacher at an English studio in Dublin and I've been teaching for just a little over two years. This year I completed my delta. I decided to go to London to do it and I wasn't working, I was doing a 12-minute course so it was really super intense. I picked up a lot of things but in such a short space of time it's only now that I'm really working towards everything I learned. One of the things I took from my course, one of the things I enjoyed most was learning about task-based teaching and that's why I'm here, I'm just talking about my experience of trying to implement it in my classroom. So first of all, what is task-based teaching? For anyone who doesn't know, Scott Thornbray says it's a lesson where the task is the basic unit of planning and teaching while Larson Freeman Anderson says that the TBL, our task-based learning, gives priority to communicating over predetermined linguistic content, grammar or lenses, teaching through communication rather than for it. So the second thing I had to contend with one of the courses, what is a task? I mean, I don't know how much you know about task-based learning but when I started teaching I was like, everything in a coursebook is a task, like I'm doing this so I don't know why I need to learn any more about this, I'm doing a task every day. But then in my course I got to learn a little bit more about this and Dave and Jane with us who I read a lot from about this, they defined what a task is by asking these six questions. Does the activity engage her as interest? Does it have a primary focus on meaning? Will there be an outcome to this task and is success judged in terms of this? Is completion a priority and does the activity relate to real-world activities? I think what I like the most about task-based learning is that, at this last point, it isn't relevant, it isn't real communication for communication's sake. So you can have types of tasks and I got this from Dave and Jane Willis doing task-based teaching from 2007. You can have comparing tasks, ranking and sorting tasks which I think are my favourite to bring it to the classroom because they're quite easy to make yourself. You've got problem-solving tasks, projects and creative tasks which is always quite nice because you give a little freedom to students, well a little bit more freedom to students and sharing personal experiences and listing. So just to choose one of them, we're going to have just a quick look at types of listing tasks. So you get your students to list qualities of a world leader which I think works quite nicely with an advanced group. I have done it before and the things that they come out with, especially with the current political climate. So that works really well for a higher level. I think for lower levels, pretty intermediate groups, criteria for choosing a place to stay for holiday is a nice list to make. And it's also handy if they're planning in trips while they're over here, which many of them do. Just yesterday I had two students bring in those two cases because they're in the class, they're going away. And then for every level I think it's possible to talk about or to list strategies for learning English outside of the classroom. It's a nice helpful one and it's very informative. My personal favourite is Desert Island Toolkit. There's a lovely activity on TeachThis.com where you have a picture of about 20 things you can choose from if you're still in a desert island. But you can only choose five and then you join a group and then you can only choose three. It's your job to persuade people and you don't have to agree or disagree. There's loads of ways you can do this and help students use this language in a meaningful way. Although that's hope nobody ever gets to know or has done in the past 90 personal experiences. So I wanted to give you just a little bit of my personal experience, what did I do? The first time I used task-based teaching was during my course we had a personal development assignment and your experimental lesson, you could choose task-based learning, you could choose job which is terrifying. You could choose disability which I find very confusing. So I knew when I was doing my tours I had a real issue with taking students language and operating it or reformulating it. So I chose this TBL to help me help them in a way. With this group I had a mixed low-intermediate B1 group of 12 or more students and the lesson aim was by the end of the lesson students will be better able to talk about qualities that make a good employee. I knew from doing a needs analysis of my whole group that they were living in London but they weren't working, they really wanted to work, they really wanted to know more business terminology and how to present to themselves in a job interview. So I thought this was an ideal task. So I made a ranking task and I put a list of 7 qualities and they had to choose which ones were most important. This is what it looked like. This is my first ever one, even looking at it now I'm a bit horrified. So what makes a good employee? Write these qualities in order of importance to you. If your students will do this alone then they'll compare and they'll have a chat to see what similarities and differences each person in the class had. I found this quite challenging to make because of the language I was presenting. Did I want to have difficult language or challenging language at first? Or was it just about communicating? Trying to find that balance I found quite tough. So I'm just going to run through the framework of the task-based lesson if people aren't familiar with it. I started with a pre-task activity to kind of what the appetite would do the need in. So at the beginning of the lesson I told my students I have a job interview gone wrong. We've all had them and actually it's a good way to share stories with you and your students. I told them about a job interview I had a number of years ago where I lied because I was really desperate to get a job. It feared it out and it was really embarrassing but it's still a good story. So I then asked them if they had any similar experiences and they go off and have a chat with their partner or their group next to them. And then I monitored. Monitoring during this type of lesson is very important because at this point you want to collect what language they already have because then you know that by the end of the lesson or by the language focus stage you know what gaps need to be filled. So then you nominate two students or two pairs to answer their experiences. It's a kind of problem to rely on the atmosphere I think is quite nice. Then the task cycle begins. So for this task I explained what the mapping task was. I gave them the task and then they worked alone just to two minutes pick and choose what your preference is and then when they're comparing it's really important to get them to not show their answers because if they show their answers they're not really likely to explain they're just going to show and that really like I learned the hard way they let that happen you have no language to kind of upgrade. So I have to make very sure that they were not showing each other. It's a bit of a secret. Then when the task has been done and they've explained that they have to plan how they're going to present their information to the rest of the group. So it's like a little mini presentation of sorts. So they report that there are similarities and differences to the class. So to speak what structure will your answer take? I once made a student cry because they didn't want your presentation and I felt terrible. They felt terrible. The whole class felt terrible. So students who are quieter like myself if they don't want to talk too much or don't really put that much pressure on you but we have a chat at the end of the class. Because I never learned that experience again. So it's important that the reporting stage you're just asking pairs what do they find out about each other. If you have a large group it's hard to get feedback from every group without affecting pace. I learned this as well. Because you might be hearing repetitive answers and students might be bored and it'll drop them into the classroom. But if you have a smaller group by all means chat to everyone it'll be quite nice. You decide how much feedback you give on this. Then the meat of the lesson I think is language focus. By this point in the lesson you have kind of compiled a list of all the language you're noticing, how you can improve it. Is there anything that that they're really missing? Depending on the level, what should they be using at this point? And then you board it. And you make sure that your students write a copy of what they're writing on board in their notebooks. They can look at it or they can check their phones but if you tell them make this list in your notebook they'll always have it. And then when you go through meaning, form, pronunciation and drilling if necessary you just let the students have a chat about what language do they like, what would they use a little bit of reflection at this point. And then afterwards you do the task again except for a different partner. So you're going, you may not do the task again because it's a use of paper that you don't need but you might just get them to explain to a different partner what their preferences are and it works quite well. When I was doing this I ran out of time to do the task repetitions. So you need to be really aware of the timing when you're doing this, especially if you're doing an observation or if you're doing an observation, if you're being observed or if you just know what time you're finishing and when you have to complete things. But it's always quite nice. Some students can be resistant to it because they're like, why are you doing this again and why have you done it? But I think as long as you stress I want you to try to use this language if you can see what works for you. I probably wouldn't spend too long on task repetition but what it gives the students an opportunity to try it out and see if it fits. And what responses do you like? Yes. Now that I've completed my delta I've been teaching a few different levels and it's something I like to do maybe once or twice a week. If students really don't like it they can leave it at two or three months or whatever. But I find lower levels love task-based learning because it gives them a chance to talk and the teacher steps away. Because all they want to do is talk, talk, talk they want to communicate and they want to communicate in a way that's more meaningful than here's a couple of questions from the book trying to find out your answers to your partner. Especially if it was good stuff they're doing it for the first time it helps a bit. For higher levels talking didn't really fascinate them as much but they were really interested in the upgrade of language how can we sound more advanced and having longer chunks of language on the board my advanced students who are lovely to the best of ones who've ever, I hope they'll like this. They really appreciate the longer chunks of language that I can give them as a name-speaker and also someone from Ireland who might say something a little bit different differently. When I was teaching in London I had a student who kind of asked me to stop speaking because they didn't want my accent. It's really pushing. But when I find that my students are here if they're learning in the country they won't tell all the Irishers they want to know a little bit of gay as well. A little clopante which is quite nice. How would help me develop as a teacher? For anyone who's thinking of doing it or maybe has done it but hasn't done it in a while I can only recommend it. This paragraph here is a little bit of the text from my assignment on my Delta course and I was up at the top I was just to find why I wanted to try to have faith learning. I chose it for my experimental practice because I like to improve and giving feedback to students dealing with emerging language confidently because I was worried I would get it wrong or they didn't want what I was going to give them and language clarification as well and tuning into the lesson. I don't know about you but I learned how to show you my Delta course and over a couple of months you start to realise you're monitoring but it's really just standing up and doing everything. But my Delta course this actually helped me tune into different conversations to try to mind the pick up the language that I wanted to work on or I wanted to upgrade for them. I just reiterate the benefits of TBL you focus on meaning instead of form which is an alternative to PPP because we all do PPP when we begin and then to mix it up a little bit we can try TBL it gives them a chance to talk and then look at language it fosters genuine communication and I think especially in higher levels they realise this my advanced group are not really keen well I can't speak for everyone but I know the general idea is they're not really keen on course books they want language that they know that they will need that they're going to use outside of the classroom and this has definitely helped them. The repetition cycle at the end helps students to upgrade and play with language it's not all just learn, learn, learn it's just it's a play with it see if it fits and not everything you teach them is what they want to learn and want to remember it's also really good for a teacher because it's a very it's a material light approach the only thing I needed for that lesson one-hour lesson was that task everything else was me the students just talking picking the language and yeah it's an alternative to PPP so thank you