task-based language teaching (tblt)

The present study was aimed at investigating the short-term and long-term impact of teaching Arabic tenses to Iranian Arabic learners through TBLT. The research enjoyed a quasi-experimental design. Eighty eleventh-grade male (N=40) and female (N=40) high school students majoring in Persian Literature and Humanities in Felavarjan, Isfahan comprised the study sample. Eight Arabic tenses including simple past, present perfect, continuous past, past perfect, subjective past, simple present, subjective present, and simple future in addition to their negative forms were instructed to the students in the control and experimental groups. The tenses were taught by the grammar-translation method (GTM) to the control group. On the other hand, the experimental group received instruction in the tenses via TBLT. The grammar test devised by the researchers was administered ahead of, immediately after, and three weeks after the instruction. The scores of the students in both groups significantly increased in the post-test and delayed-post-test. However, the experimental group had signiciantly superior performance in both tests particularly in case of more complex structures. The results point to the statistically significant impact of TBLT in the short and long run which could be attributed to its communicative and real-life nature. The findings suggest that this recent method is effective in teaching Arabic.

Training competent translators who can effectively and readily meet the needs of the translation market is currently a major challenge for translation instructors; however, L2 teaching methodologies have marked a more accelerated progress in general. The present study was an interdisciplinary effort to examine the possibility of transferring these achievements to translation instruction, with a particular focus on Task-Based Language Teaching. To this end, first, the components of Task-Based Translation Teaching (TBTT) were extracted by reviewing the related literature, administrating an open-ended questionnaire to 17 translation instructors, and using Delphi technique with a panel of six experts. The findings pointed at 6 main components for TBTT, namely Authenticity and Contextualization, Balanced Focus on Meaning and Form, Process-orientedness, Interactivity, Learner-centeredness, Reflectivity and Evaluation, comprising 22 subcomponents. Next, a three-hour workshop was designed based on the same components and subcomponents to put the proposed framework on trial. The merits and demerits of practically implementing this framework was elicited from the 10 participants via a semi-structured interview. Content analysis of the interview transcriptions revealed a general positive attitude on the side of the learners despite some criticisms leveled at the method. While the most frequently stated advantage was the collaborative and student-centered nature of the method, the primary drawback was stated as its being time-consuming and challenging for teachers to design and operationalize. These findings can help translation instructors to revise or revisit their curricula and lesson plans or serve as a model for future endeavors in updating teaching methodologies in translation.

The present study seeks to explore the role of TBLT method on students’ reading comprehension skill. In so doing, 80 Iranian EFL learners from two intact classes participated in the study, in which the learners from the two classes were randomly assigned to one control group and one experimental group. The researcher in the control group class followed her regular teaching practice through the conventional book-based method. However, in the experimental group class, the researcher applied task based method. Results of the comparison of the both groups indicated that although the students' scores has improved on the IELTS posttest, there was statistically significant difference between the experimental group’s performances in reading skill. Accordingly, the higher mean score, suggests that the task based method and the collaborative activities have the potentials to help learners develop a better learning of English reading skill. On top of that, findings of the questionnaires and also interviews with teachers revealed their positive attitude towards implementing the mentioned method .