In this paper I would like to consider how Task Based language teaching can be effectively incorporated for teaching English as a second language. Ever since David Wilkins, the British linguist distinguished between what he labelled as ‘synthetic approaches’ to second language teaching pedagogy and curriculum design and ‘analytical’ approaches, there have been a great amount of debates on the efficacy and methodology of both. Interestingly in India, the dominant methodology still continues to be a synthetic one where as the demand of the present times is a more analytic one where the student is to be offered a more broken down, need based and in some ways tailor based designs or courses as opposed to text based courses we could be into task based courses. Nunan has summed up the basic postulates of Task Based language teaching. Ellis defines task as a workplan that requires learners to process language pragmatically in order to achieve an outcome that can be evaluated in terms of whether the correct or appropriate propositional content has been conveyed. Based on these definition and postulates I would like to demonstrate how TBLT can effectively become an effective methodology of teaching a second language specifically English. I feel that the course designed for and that of engineering under graduate can both be catered to by different task based courses. I am not advocating total erasure of text based courses however. Learners in the classroom must be engaged in comprehending, producing, reproducing or interacting in the target language and at the same time the emphasis on the basic syntax and grammatical knowledge would be kept in mind. Emphasis on the basic idiom and phraseology of the language is also imperative. However, as Willis and Willis point out, tasks differ from grammatical exercises in that learners are free to use a range of language structures to achieve task outcomes – the forms are not specified in advance. I will try to raise a case to fit TBLT in the framework of Indian pedagogy and also for prospective learners who seek to communicate in a second language naturally the focus will be on English.
Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya, Hooghly, West Bengal
