This is a MOOC that has been created by the University of London and UCL Insitute of Education. The course is available on Coursera.
Reading is thought of as a boring activity for most students. Prior to this, the reading activity that I usually do consists of just by pulling out an English workbook and tell the students to answer the comprehension questions - which gets even more boring. Although this is done in order to practice for their upcoming public examination, usually the activity has no real-world problem solving and communicative aspects.
The usual teaching process is done using the 'P-P-P' model (Present - Practice - Produce). But the drawback to this is that students will have the tendency to either not be able to produce the language correctly or even won't produce it at all. Other than that, students will have a tendency to overuse target structure so that it sounds completely unnatural.
So, the task-based approach is an alternative to this.
What is task-based learning? To put it simply:
- it is a teaching and learning process is done entirely through communicative tasks
- in order to acquire a language fully, it must have real meaning by being used in a natural context
However, doing this task requires creativity and a lot of time preparation. Furthermore, with the extra administrative tasks that we teachers need to do, maybe it will be rarely implemented by some of us who are interested to do utilize this approach in the classroom. But if there is a will, there is a way.
Here are the assignments from the courses that I did. Feel free to download!
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