Promoting a meaningful oral production through task-supported teaching

Abstract

This paper presents an action research project that looks into the structuring of relevant tasks that may foster English language oral proficiency in an intensive course with teenagers and adults, the study took eight weeks with five groups per day among three to fifteen students and it was conducted in three stages. The problem observed consists in the fact that the EFL learners do not seem to retain information in long-term memory. They claimed that classroom instruction does not serve to understand English outside the classroom i.e., ‘real English’. Swan (2005) proposes Task-Supported Teaching (TST) as a new approach to teach EFL. The data was collected with surveys, interviews, observations and videos contemplating these variables: students' progress, beliefs, goals and meaningful tasks. With a multiple case study method to analyze the data which demonstrates students participate more when the tasks are related to their real environments and allow then to use all abilities they have in English. This project expects to inform the academy and the teachers on the relevance of TST geared to enhancing the curriculum.