One of the highlights of the DELTA course for me so far has been the experimental practice we did in week 5 of the course.
I decided to give Task-based learning a go. Though it’s not the most ‘out there’ methodology, I’d heard so many positive things about it that I felt it was time I tried it out myself.
For my task, learners had to choose from four holiday packages based on which one represented the best value for money (you can find the lesson plan and resources here). I’d designed the posters for the packages myself using a website called Canva, a great resource for creating free, colourful images that look professional and really wow the students.
Before the lesson, I was a bit concerned that this group of pre-intermediate students would struggle to complete the task, but they were actually really keen to do it and I had trouble getting them to stop in the end, showing me that this approach can work just as well with lower level learners as it does with higher level ones.
My native speaker model was also fantastic, thanks to Lance and Paul, and gave the students tons of useful language which they would have been able to use had I had time for the task repetition stage.
Feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive, showing that student-centred, ‘deep end’ approaches really are the best.
Overall I’m a big fan of TBL and will definitely be using it in the future.
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