Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching Quotes

“Tasks are the real-world activities people think of when planning, conducting, or recalling their day. That can mean things like brushing their teeth, preparing breakfast, reading a newspaper, taking a child to school, responding to e-mail messages, making a sales call, attending a lecture or a business meeting, having lunch with a colleague from work, helping a child with homework, coaching a soccer team, and watching a TV program. Some tasks are mundane, some complex.”
― Mike Long, Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

“TBLT's solution is to employ an analytic (task) syllabus, but with a focus on form to deal with problematic linguistic features, and provision of opportunities for intentional learning to speed up the learning process and to supplement the adult's weaker capacity for incidental learning, especially instance learning.”
― Mike Long, Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

“A true TBLT course, conversely, requires an investment of resources in a needs analysis and production of materials appropriate for a particular population of learners.”
― Mike Long, Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

“There is some evidence, after all, that a certain degree of tension, or classroom anxiety, can have a positive effect on learning (Scovel 1978), probably because it activates a process known to be critical for language learning: attention.”
― Mike Long, Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

“They have a right to expect language courses, like medical treatments, to be relevant and, ideally, to be designed just for them or, at the very least, for learners like them. That is why, to be rational, relevant, and successful, language course development should begin with an identification of learners' goals and an analysis of their present or future communicative needs to achieve those goals.”
― Mike Long, Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

“Skill-building theories hold that only younger learners, and in some cases, only children younger than seven, can learn a language incidentally, that is, without intending to do so and without awareness of doing so. When it comes to LT for older children and adults (usually envisaged as in the mid-teens and thereafter), therefore, they accord dominant status to explicit learning and explicit instruction.”
― Mike Long, Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching