Profile Issues in Teachers' Professional Development (Oct 2009)
Promoting Oral Production through the Task-Based Learning Approach: A Study in a Public Secondary School in Colombia
Abstract
Spoken language is used less confidently by learners in the English as a foreign language (efl ) classroom in secondary schools, and this has become a challenge for most teachers. This article describes an action research experience carried out at Francisco de Paula Santander, a public school in Bogotá, in 2004. The study was developed with a sample of learners belonging to four groups of seven graders along nine months. Data were collected by means of audio recordings, field notes and proformas. The results of the study let us analyze the different demands of transactional and interactional activities among novice efl speakers. They can also be considered an attempt to understand the implications of such activities within the framework of the Task-Based Learning approach presented by Willis (1996).
