Jane Willis and Dave Willis – Willis-ELT

Jane Willis and Dave Willis – Willis-ELT

أنا الشمس لا تخفي الحقيقة اننى نبض الحياة لسائر اللهجات

Last Year I started to teach Arabic to undergraduate students at Westminster University, using Task-based Approach.  I was lucky to read this book: 'DOING TASK-BASED TEACHING ' (TBT),  by Dave and Jane Willis It changed my approach to teaching.
 Ther wrote: A well know form-focused approach is often know as PPP(Presentation-- Practice-- Production) . This begins by highlighting one or two new forms and illustrating their meaning. It then goes on to practise that form under careful teacher control. This control is gradually relaxed until finally learners re offered the opportunity to produce the target form(s) in a communicative activity. This PPP has four characteristics

1-A focus on form(s) start and controlled by teacher.
2-This focus on form comes before learners engage in communicative activity.
3-Teacher control of learner language at the start of the lesson and gradually relaxed.
4-The success of the procedure is judged in term of weather or not learners do produce the target form with an acceptable level of accuracy.

On the other hand the TBT are based on the belief that it is more effective to encourage learners to use the language as much as possible, even if this means that some of the language they produce is inaccurate. Teachers provide learners with opportunities in the classroom to use the language for genuine communication. Hence, focus in meaning. Inevitably, in the course of a meaning- focused activity, learners will sometime naturally focus on language for themselves.
they may ask themselves: How do i best express this next idea? or 'should I be using the past tense here?' when this happens learners are not simply thinking about forms specified by the teacher and how best to incorporate these form in their output. They are thinking about language in general and searching their own language repertoire to decide how best to express themselves in a given communicative situation. This called focus on Language, which (sometimes)will involves teacher participation too.Teachers repeat learner utterances, reshaping them to make them clearer or supply words or phrase to help learner shape their message.When teachers do this they are acting as participants in the interaction. Finally, teachers direct learners'attention to specific forms which occur in the course of a task or an associated text.they may exemplify,explain and practice these forms. This call a focus on form. Teacher should be careful that this focus on form should not detract from a focus on meaning. The simplest way to do this is to withhold this focus on form until after a task has been completed.
so the TBT has three distinction:
1-A focus on meaning in ( communication).
2- A focus on language (learner think for themselves, teacher sometimes help)
3- A focus on form (grammatical forms are isolated and specigied for study, or the teacher comments on student language by drawing attention to problems). (Dave willis and jane willis -Doing Task- based Teaching) Oxford press.


In the above link you will find the authors are immensly helpfull by given free lesson plan.