Preparing for change and troubleshooting
4.6.4.1
Preparing yourself
4.6.4.2 Practical preparation
4.6.4.3 Intellectual preparation
4.6.4.4 Beliefs check
4.6.4.5 Psychological preparation
4.6.4.6 Action points
4.6.4.7 Attitudes, beliefs and change
4.6.4.8 Action point / belief check
4.6.4.9 Preparing others: ownership
4.6.4.10 Action point
4.6.4.11 Students' beliefs
4.6.4.12 Colleagues' beliefs
4.6.4.13 Practicalities
4.6.4.14 Sustaining change and troubleshooting
4.6.4.1
Preparing yourself
For me, there are three ways you can prepare yourself for introducing
TBL into your teaching successfully and, I hope, fairly painlessly. These
are:
4.6.4.2
Practical preparation
This can include:
- drawing up your overall course plan in terms of syllabus, order of topics and how these will be divided into the lessons available;
- designing, recording and transcribing your tasks;
- deciding what your language focus activities will be;
- preparing support materials that you will need in class;
- arranging for equipment you will need;
- getting ready questionnaires or other instruments to gauge student reaction to TBL.
Are there any others you would add?
Apart from the benefits you yourself will gain from being organized in this way (such as reduced stress levels), you will inspire confidence in your students if you are always well-prepared and unflustered. This is important when students may be feeling unsettled or insecure as they are becoming accustomed to a new way of learning their chosen language.
4.6.4.3
Intellectual preparation
By this I mean 'knowing your method'. If you have a very clear idea of
what task-based learning is about and the rationale on which it is based,
you will be able to allay students' and colleagues' concerns if these
arise. You will also feel more confident yourself, which will almost certainly
convey itself to your students.
If you have worked through all or most of this module you are probably already in a good position as far as understanding your teaching approach is concerned, but if there are any areas that you are unsure about, I would urge you to revise these, or follow up with some of the recommended optional reading.
4.6.4.4
Beliefs check
Over the course of completing this module, you may have encountered new
ideas and though completing the activities, your concepts of language
learning may have evolved.
- Go back to Activity cycle 1 and redo the belief check in 4.1.2.8. Have your responses changed since you first did this? In what ways?
4.6.4.5
Psychological preparation
The third type of preparation is vital, as it will sustain you if things
do not go as well as you had hoped.
Many people are not comfortable with change, not least colleagues who feel strongly that the traditional way to teach language is still the best way. If you know from the start that you may be a lone pioneer of TBL in your immediate context, and that you will almost certainly meet with reluctance or resistance to the new approach from at least some quarters, you should try to take some steps in advance to help you maintain your own motivation and conviction should this happen.
Tessa Woodward (1996) has some helpful suggestions for this. She advocates finding like-minded people who can give each other mutual support, perhaps colleagues in the same institution, but possibly further afield, or even people who you contact mainly by e-mail. (Of course, an added advantage of getting together a 'TBL' group is that you can exchange materials and ideas and may be able to help each other in practical ways too by recording tasks, checking instructions, etc.) She also suggests reading as much as you can about the topic - so finding time to look at language teaching journals for recent articles on TBL (especially for English language teaching, which seems to have quite a lot going in this area at present), can give you a sense of belonging to a community of TBL practitioners. You may be able to find internet discussion groups or email lists to join so you can exchange experiences with like-minded people. All of these measures are aimed at helping you to feel that you are not alone, and that there are others who support what you are doing even if some of your immediate colleagues do not!
This would be a good point at which to do Reading 6 (see 4.6.7).
- Approach as many people as you can who you think will support your introduction of TBL into your teaching.
- Explain that you would like to establish an informal network of TBL supporters with whom you can exchange ideas and experiences from time to time.
- Do an Internet search for discussion groups for teachers of your language. Join any promising looking groups and post messages to see if anyone else is using, or is interested in, TBL.
- Go to your library and flick through the latest few issues of any magazines and periodicals on language teaching, including English language teaching (ELT or EFL) to find which ones frequently include articles on TBL.
4.6.4.7
Attitudes, beliefs and change
Another aspect of psychological preparation relates to the concept of
'planned behaviour' introduced in Module
1. This suggests that there are three psychological elements that
interact to determine how strongly someone's motivation to do something
will be.
- Attitude: the degree to which you feel that TBL is desirable or not. If you have got this far with this module it probably means that you have a very positive attitude towards TBL per se, but on its own this may not be enough to convince you to adopt it in your classes.
- Subjective norms: how you think other people (students, colleagues) will view TBL, may make you hesitant. What if the students demand a traditional approach? What if your colleagues question what you are doing? The section below on 'preparing others' has some ideas to help you overcome any real or perceived resistance to TBL that you may encounter. But simply being aware that this could be one of the factors holding you back can be enough in itself to make you dismiss these worries and try anyway.
- Perceived behavioural control: can have similarly damping effects on your motivation but the source is different. Here you might believe there are personal or physical obstacles to prevent you introducing TBL - a very large class size that you may not be able to control, or being allocated a classroom with fixed seats, making group work very inconvenient.
4.6.4.8 Action point / belief check
- Have a brainstorming session to think of as many pros and cons to introducing TBL in your classes as you can.
- Classify the items from the brainstorm under the three headings 'What I think (attitude)', 'What I think others will think (subjective norms)' and 'Practical considerations (perceived behavioural control)'.
- For each item, consider whether you have any justification for including it. For example, if you think students will feel safer with a familiar approach (con), do you have any evidence for this? Have you asked them? If you have no real evidence, put brackets round the item.
- Then for each unbracketed item, try to think of a solution (it can be helpful to do this stage with a colleague).
Having done this exercise, you should feel more aware of why you feel positive or negative about introducing TBL, indeed, your overall intention to do so may well have changed as you 'dismissed' some doubts that turned out to be unsubstantiated assumptions, or thought of potential obstacles that had not occurred to you before. In addition, you may have identified some subjective norms that need to be checked up on, by asking colleagues and students what their real opinions are, or some aspects of behavioural control that you could act on to overcome.
4.6.4.9
Preparing others: ownership
Literature on managing innovation tells us that change is most likely
to be successful if all participants, especially the 'end users' (ie the
students) have a sense of ownership over the innovation.
You may be able to include your students in the detailed planning of their course, and in this way give them a sense of involvement and control. For example:
- Do a needs and interests survey to help you to select appropriate topics, texts and skills work for your lessons.
- Try to meet, or contact students in writing, a good time before the course starts if at all possible, so you can genuinely use their responses to your queries when you plan your course.
- If you can't get access to the students before the start of the course, plan the first few sessions in advance and then plan the rest on the basis of a survey done in the first week. You could do this by designing a questionnaire that asks them why they are learning the language, what their previous experiences are, and for any specific ideas about what they will need to do in the language
- I would also advise drawing up a preliminary list of proposed topics or themes for students to rate as interesting / relevant or not, and give them the opportunity to suggest other areas of their choice. You could even ask them to give you any texts they would like to study in class.
Check Module 12 for more ideas on encouraging students to take greater responsibility for their own learning, and to 'own' their programme.
- Discuss with your Head of Department or module leader how, and in what ways, you might be able to contact students before the start of the course.
- From the outcomes of this discussion, decide on how and when you will consult students on their course content.
4.6.4.11
Students' beliefs
If you 'spring' TBL as a new approach on your students, it could come
as a shock to them! Like you, they will have some well-formed beliefs
about what should happen in a language classroom, and you could be about
to challenge these beliefs in a big way.
Furthermore, their reactions to the proposed approach will be influenced not just by their attitude to it in principle, but by subjective norm and perceived behavioural control factors, just as you are. For example, they may believe that others will not think they are doing a serious course of study if they spend so much time 'playing games' and talking, or they may worry that there will not be time to complete the syllabus because completing each task cycle takes up so much class time.
When introducing your students to the new approach, try to help them uncover and reconsider their beliefs in the same way that you have done in this course, as a first step towards changing these, or at least retaining them for good reasons. You could even adapt some of the activities you have done in this module, translating them into your target language for higher level learners. Most adult students are actually quite interested in how the process of learning works, once they are given the opportunity to think about it!
4.6.4.12
Colleagues' beliefs
In addition, colleagues and even heads of department are often suspicious
of new teaching approaches if they don't really understand what they are
about. For example, many people think that TBL just means doing lots of
communicative tasks, and ignoring language structure. If you think it
is appropriate, consider holding a short briefing session to present the
main ideas and features of TBL to your colleagues, or prepare a short
leaflet for them explaining your plans and what TBL is about. Consider
inviting them to observe some of your classes.
Obviously, you don't want to frighten them off by sounding like a TBL evangelist, but if you can assure them that this is a well thought through, comprehensive approach based on sound learning principles, you might get them interested in trying it for themselves. If you do have any fellow enthusiasts, you will find things much easier than going it alone. As with your students, try to do all this in a way which recognizes that they already hold certain beliefs about teaching and learning, and that your proposed approach might challenge.
- Tell students in advance what they will need to bring. Dedicated notebooks for recording new language in language focus sessions, and 'Walkman'-type audio cassette recorders and blank cassettes for recording their own task performance are suggestions.
- You may also want to recommend particular reference books and, of course, students will need to now if they have to buy a set coursebook.
- If you are preparing a 'rationale sheet' to distribute to students before the course begins, all this information can be included on your sheet.
I recommend that you now do Reading 7 (see 4.6.7).
At this point you may also like to complete part 2 of the assessment task, although if you are doing this for your students, it may be worth waiting until you have completed the remaining sections below so you can include a note explaining your feedback policy.
4.6.4.14 Sustaining change and troubleshooting
- Believe in what you are doing, and don't give up!
I asked Jane Willis what advice she had for someone adopting TBL in their lessons. Here is her response:
Video JW27 Transcript
I think they need to be doing it because they really believe in it, because they really do believe that learners are going to learn better this way and not sort of say half-heartedly, 'Well, I tried a task but it didn't quite work so I'm going back to the old way, because it isn't easy to start with, because if learners aren't used to doing that kind of thing, if they're not used to trying to activate what they've got already and risk-taking and putting things to use I think they need to be told, maybe in their mother tongue at the beginning of the course, that this is going to be different. Now it doesn't always work first time and other tasks I've done haven't always worked first time, and that's probably because I haven't tried the instructions out on someone or, and you need to think, 'Well why didn't that work so well? Maybe I gave them too long, or maybe I didn't set it up properly, maybe I haven't activated enough relevant vocabulary, but always, if it doesn't work so well, always think why and try again.
- What if the students tell
you that they need to do more grammar, because that is what they always
find difficult in the exam?
Adopting a task-based approach does not mean that you will be neglecting grammar. Make sure students know this. Explain that they will be meeting and revising familiar structures but through a much more communicative and meaningful way. Make sure that when 'problem' structures do occur in your texts or transcripts, you highlight them and spend a few minutes discussing their usage in that particular context. But don't let this take over!
Jane Willis reminds us of the importance of explaining to students the basics of rationale of the approach, but above all, letting students get on with the business of using the language themselves:
Video JW28 Transcript
If they've already had some teaching of that language before, like for example with French or German, it's quite likely they've done some at school already, and they've failed, and that's why they're now back in the class with you, then you could make the point that the way you're going to do it is called task-based learning and it's very different from what they did before, and it relies on, it stimulates natural acquisition processes: 'We're not going to worry too much about accuracy to start with, just first of all to aim at getting you to say as much as you can, and activate as much of what you already know as possible, and then we'll build on what you know.' So it's a building on what you know, so not thinking of your learners as empty vessels to be filled up with facts about the language or grammar structures or words, but getting the learners to actually do as much as they can. And I think that is difficult for a teacher to start with because you've got to stand back and let them do it.
- Build in opportunities for
positive encouragement
Every three of four weeks (depending on how many hours a week you have each class), spend some class time on a progress checking session. For example, if you or the students have been recording the tasks and / or the spoken reports, get them to play through the recordings of themselves. Try redoing an earlier task (they should find it much easier). Get students to look at their notebooks that they keep for language focus work and see how much you have covered since the beginning of the course or the last progress check. Get them to compare first drafts of written work with final drafts. Jane Willis reiterates these points. Looking for positive signs of progress like this can be very motivating for you as well as the students.
- Build confidence for the
exam
If there is an end of course exam, get hold of some past papers. Every time your language focus work brings up an item tested on the exam paper, try to build the exam question into your language focus work. When you finish the language focus stage (assuming the students were successful) reveal to the students that 'question 3' or whatever was from the exam paper, and they have done it successfully. During the progress review, remind them of all the exam questions they can already do.
- Respond and adapt
If students seem to be reacting negatively to your approach, take steps to find out what their concerns are, and be prepared to address these (see the sections that follow on feedback). This does not mean, however, that you should immediately jump to do whatever the students ask. If they are worried about whether TBL is preparing them sufficiently for a structural exam, for example, or if they feel that all the time they spend in class talking would be better spent studying grammar rules, this is quite possibly a reflection of their previous experience of language learning that has shaped their beliefs about what should happen in a language classroom (see Module 1). If they remain unconvinced, you may be able to compromise, perhaps by allocating a proportion of course time to exam preparation or taking greater efforts to highlight structural points when they arise in the language focus stage. The precise action will depend on your judgement of the situation and your knowledge of your students, but whatever you do, don't ignore signs of boredom or discontent as these will only get worse as time goes on.
I recommend that you now do Reading 8 (see 4.6.7).
