Many of us are familiar with a general outline of Task-Based Language Teaching but may feel a nebulous hold on some of the specific tenets. A few of us are ready to take a deep dive to learn exactly what it is and how it works.
Fortunately, we have just such a vehicle to make that dive, a new text by some of the leaders in the field; Rod Ellis, Peter Skehan, Shaofeng Li, Natsuko Shintani, and Craig Lambert. Task-Based Language Teaching: Theory and Practice is part of the Cambridge Applied Linguistics series and a comprehensive overview of the research that has brought TBLT to the world and to most language teacher training programs. This is an inclusive view of TBLT, with room for contrary and controversial viewpoints.
We hope to assemble a small group of educators and researchers from a variety of contexts to hammer out the nature of TBLT by looking at it from 5 viewpoints; Cognitive, Psycholinguistic, Sociocultural, Psychological, and Educational, each covered in a chapter of the text. The final section will explore TBLT practice with syllabus design and teaching methodology.
Live online Zoom sessions will be held eight times in May and June, on Wednesdays from 11:00 to 12:00 GMT. Recordings will be available.
Live sessions (registered participants only)
- May 12th – course participants only (60 minutes)
- May 19th – course participants only (60 minutes)
- May 26th – course participants only (60 minutes)
- June 2nd – course participants only (60 minutes)
- June 9th – course participants only (60 minutes)
- June 16th – course participants only (60 minutes)
- June 23rd – course participants only (60 minutes)
- June 30th – course participants only (60 minutes)
Cost: $300 USD (We can provide receipts for research funds, if needed.)
Required book: In the course we will explore Task-based Language Teaching: Theory and practice (Rod Ellis, et al., 2019).
Participants will be expected to have a copy of the book used in the course.
Registration includes the eight live sessions and unlimited discussions each week in a private forum. Upon successful completion of the course participants will receive a certificate verifying that they are an "iTDi Great Minds Educator".
This 8-week online iTDi Great Minds in Language Education course will bring up to 20 teachers together in our user-friendly iTDi online classroom every Sunday, and then continue throughout the week – sharing, discussing and reflecting in a private, but vibrant, online community.
As a registered participant, don’t worry if you have to miss a live class or if the time for the live sessions doesn't work well for your time zone. You’ll receive weekly recordings of each class, full transcripts of the text chat during class, assigned readings and a PDF of the PowerPoint slides. Furthermore, the online community will certainly become a wealth of ideas and information, and will remain private and online for your use anytime in the future.
Scholarships
As always, iTDi believes that all teachers deserve the same opportunity to improve themselves. Therefore, a limited number of scholarships will be available for this course. Please apply through our scholarship application.Kevin Ryan:
Kevin Ryan has taught in Barcelona, Chicago, Nanjing, and for the last 35 years, in Tokyo where he is a Professor at Showa Women's University at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
A scholarship led him to a summer TESOL institute at Northwestern with Michael Long, which lead to a scholarship at the University of Illinois at Chicago under Elliot Judd. During the year in Nanjing, he trained post-doc Ministry of Agriculture scientists from all over China for grad school in the US. He has also taught at the Unversity of Tokyo and Keio University.
Most of Kevin's research has focused on CALL, which developed from leading the Tokyo PC User Group through the transition from BBSs to the web in the early 90s, then as leader of the JALT CALL SIG along with editing publications like Recipes for Wired Teachers. He has been involved in many aspects of JALT, with two stints on the Board of Directors. For four summers up to the pandemic he has done teacher training for the NLD in several locations in Myanmar.
