Implementing tasks in young learners’ language classrooms: A collaborative teacher education initiative through task evaluation

Abstract

Despite empirical evidence in support of the effectiveness of using tasks in young learners’ classrooms, task implementation has been repeatedly reported as a thorny problem. An essential but under-researched issue is how in-service teacher education programme can be conducted to facilitate teachers’ implementing tasks in their classrooms. This practitioner research article reports on a researcher and teacher educator’s action research study in which she worked with Lucille (pseudonym), a novice English language teacher, to design and implement two repeated task-based language teaching (TBLT) lessons for Grade 2 students at a Chinese primary school. During a six-week teacher education program consisting of two cycles of TBLT lesson planning, implementation, evaluation, and reflection, the teacher educator provided continuous support to guide and scaffold Lucille’s reflective endeavours at crafting TBLT practices in her classrooms. The teacher educator also conducted student-based, response-based, learning-based, and community-based task evaluations to facilitate the teacher’s reflective practices. The study illustrates how an in-service teacher education program, fuelled by on-going professional support and empirical evaluation, facilitated a practitioner’s task implementation in young learners’ foreign language classrooms.