The effectiveness of task-based instruction on third-year

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Education in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of. The author, whose copyright is stated on the title page of the work, has granted the British University in Dubai the right to lend the thesis to users of its library and to make partial or single copies for educational use and research.

Introduction

Together, they believed that focusing in L2 classrooms on communicative language teaching approaches is the most appropriate way to improve students' skill level in the four basic language skills in general and speaking language skill in particular. According to Richards and Rodgers (2015), TBI is one of the communicative approaches to language learning, which focuses on asking students to complete communicative tasks that are meaningful and authentic using the target language.

Background of the Study

On the other hand, Krashen's (1982) theory of L2 language acquisition was a reaction to the audio-lingual method of L2 language teaching that peaked in the 1960s when it was used to teach English as a first language to American students and as a foreign language for speakers of other languages. As a result, the CLT paradigm has been widely used in the classroom to develop the four main language skills (speaking, writing, reading and listening) through a variety of classroom activities, but with a much greater emphasis on speaking and writing skills to improve students' abilities. communicate correctly and effectively using the target language.

The Educational Context of the Study

Teaching English as a Second Language in Egypt

The investigator of this study intends to investigate TBI through a quasi-experimental study design using two groups with one assigned TBI and the other used 3Ps to assess its impact on students' speaking performance in the context of the current study. know. The broader aim of these efforts was to improve students' skills in the four language skills in general and communicative language skills in particular to create a new generation of young individuals capable of coping with the challenges of live and serve the Egyptian community (Darwish 2016).

Structure of the Pre-University Education in Egypt

A complete picture of the education system in Egypt, including the age of students and the number of years for each school level, is shown in Figure (1).

Statement of the Problem

However, research on the effects of TBI on the speaking skills of students in Egypt was very. The results of this study supported the other empirical research in a foreign context into the positive influence of TBI on students' speaking skills.

Research Purpose, Hypothesis & Questions

Significance of the Study

Third, this study serves to bridge the gap in the literature regarding the scarcity of research on the effectiveness of TBI in increasing students' speaking level, taking into account the limitations and recommendations of the study conducted in the same context. Fifth, this study is the only one conducted in the Egyptian context to incorporate two main components of research into a TBI-related study; the study of the effects of TBI and the exploration of teachers' beliefs about TBI.

Thesis Organization

The results of this research are critically discussed in Chapter Five to help relate the research findings to current teaching practice and research objectives. The final, sixth chapter summarizes the main findings, discusses the limitations of the current research, and makes recommendations for potential future research in this area.

Summary of the Chapter

In view of the main purpose of the current study; Investigating the impact of TBI on third year secondary students' speaking performance in terms of fluency, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, this chapter consists of two main sections. The first section provides a conceptual framework for the study which includes a critical review of different meanings of the main constructs; such as speaking, fluency, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, teacher beliefs, task and task-based learning, as well as a critical review of different types of communicative tasks, the development of TBI frameworks and more impact of TBI, paying particular attention to Willis's (1996) TBI framework.

Conceptual Framework

Definition of Speaking

According to Cameron (2019), speaking is the ability of speakers to express meaning so that other people can understand it. Based on this, we can conclude that speech is the act of speaking through which people can communicate with others to achieve certain goals.

Importance of Speaking

From this we can conclude that effective speaking education can have a positive influence on students' proficiency in the four language skills. To further support this view from the literature, research shows that effective speaking education led to the development of students' listening skills (Saskatchewan Education 1997), their writing skills (Goh & Doyle 2014) and their reading skills (de Gelder & Morais 2018). ).

Psycholinguistic Mechanisms & Processes of L1/L2 Speaking

However, the output of the pre-word plan in the conceptualizer is not always a clear message, as many L2 speakers experience difficulties in speaking. The first question is whether the conceptual features of the message produced by L2 speakers during the message.

Measuring L2 Speaking Performance

Oral Fluency
Linguistic Complexity

Accuracy is also defined by Housen and Kuiken (2009, p. 461) as "the ability to produce error-free speech". Syntactic complexity, on the other hand, is defined by Ortega (2015, p. 82) as "the range and the sophistication of grammatical resources exhibited in language production".

Teachers’ Belief Construct

Based on the recommendations of a study conducted by Elbaz (1983) regarding five aspects of teachers' beliefs or knowledge, many researchers began to define teachers. Similarly, Gokce and Kecik (2021) provided Borg's perspective on teacher cognition, investigating language teacher cognition in terms of the influence of four teacher factors.

Language Teachers’ Belief & Innovation

The study conducted by Gao and Zhou (2021) was also important because it sought to investigate the relationship between teachers' beliefs about the medium of instruction and their teaching practices in a Chinese context. This ensures that teachers are innovative in the classroom, provided that the factors influencing their knowledge and practices are carefully examined.

Definitions of a Task

Tasks are activities that learners perform using the target language in a communicative environment to achieve an outcome. Tasks are interactive activities designed to encourage the learner's use of the target language and to achieve the goal.

Types of Communicative Tasks

For example, teachers can decide the best course of action to take based on given purposes and within given obstacles. For example, students may engage in a talk about a social issue with no expectation of having the same views in the same situation or on other different events.

Characteristics of TBI

This view towards TBI is also maintained by Richards and Rodgers (2015) who point out that TBI is a holistic approach in which students' linguistic, social and communicative aspects are developed through the assignment of communicative tasks in the classroom and through the assignment of students to work in pairs or small groups to complete the assigned communicative tasks. On the other hand, Richards and Rodgers (2015) argue that teachers play a facilitating role; that is, guiding students' learning, in tandem with some additional roles that include acting as facilitators, strategy instructors, pre-task aware, task selectors, and task sequencers.

TBI and TSLT, What is the Difference?

To explain this, tasks in the TBI approach are used as a vehicle to assess student performance based on their successful completion of the assigned tasks. After discussing the difference between TBI and TSLT, we can argue that TBI is the one assigned to the current experimental group because (1) the tasks provided are the core units of the syllabus, (2) students are assessed based on their successful completion of the tasks, (3) the focus is on language meaning not language form, (4) teachers at the warm-up stage only refresh students' minds to the topic-related vocabulary, and (5) students use what they do not know what they are presented with language structure to report on the task.

Development of TBI Frameworks

This framework assumes that the classroom tasks should encourage students to participate actively in class and improve their competence in language structure. Thinking further of new models to cover the above constraints, highly influential frameworks of sequential phases emerged such as; Prabhu's (1987) TBI framework, Long's (1991) TBI framework, Willis's (1996) TBI framework, Skehan's (1996) TBI framework, and Ellis's (2003) TBI framework.

Critical Review of the Most Influential TBI Frameworks

The third phase increases students' awareness of the target grammar by analyzing the data in the assigned listening activity. The fourth phase serves to explicitly increase students' attention to grammatical and/or lexical features of the target language.

Overview of Willis’s (1996) TBI Framework

Components of the Pre-Task Phase
Components of the Task Cycle Phase
Components of the Language Focus Phase

It is important not to give a detailed overview of student performance during the task phase, as this forms the next two phases of the cycle phase. The main role of teachers during this phase is to review the students' analysis of the assigned activities and ensure that their analysis is correct.

Figure 2: Overview of TBI Framework (Willis 1996, p. 135)

Issues with the Application of TBI in the Classroom Context

Additionally, Seedhouse (1997) argues that student interaction during assigned activities is not rich and, if so, is of poor quality, which can lead to fossilization. It also argues that the use of busy tasks as work plans to achieve specific outcomes has weak construct validity, as student interaction during the task is unsupervised, meaning that the intended outcomes may not be achieved.

Commentary on the Conceptual Framework

As can be seen from the literature reviewed, one of the most attractive features of TBI was that teachers can use different communicative tasks with different levels of complexity to suit the diversity of students' skill levels and to tackle other problems that are taken against its applicability in the classroom context. Along with the above, the literature showed that there are many influential TBI frameworks of three sequential steps that can be used in the classroom to improve students' speaking skills.

Previous Related Studies in the Field

The Impact of TBI on Language Development

The results also showed the positive perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders, including teachers and students, towards the use of TBI to develop students'. The results from the meta-analysis studies also revealed a number of methodological and programmatic features that influence the use of TBI to include the implementation cycle, the analysis of student needs, and the locations where TBI courses or programs are implemented.

The Impact of TBI on L2 Speaking Performance

The Impact of TBI on L2 Overall Speaking
The Impact of TBI on L2 Oral Fluency
The Impact of TBI on the Three CAF Components 128
The Impact of TBI on L2 Speaking Performance

The most important findings of this study were: (1) the preference to investigate certain target characteristics such as accuracy, vocabulary, fluency, grammar, and the little tendency to investigate pragmatics, pronunciation and the quality of students' performance on tasks, (2 ) a strong inclination to research on mature students, (3) the majority of researchers chose to conduct their studies on intermediate students, but without providing clear justification about students' current skill levels as determined by international tests (e.g. IELTS -tests, TOEFL) tests, etc.), (4) most experiments were conducted in classroom settings, not laboratories, (5) most studies were conducted on university-level students, (6) the majority of studies involved oral language production rather than written language production research use. The researcher relied on some measures in calculating students' speaking performance in terms of the three CAF components.

Teachers’ Beliefs towards TBI

Studies in the Non-Egyptian Context
Studies in the Egyptian Context

Taken together, the findings of the above studies were positive towards the use of TBI in the classroom to promote students' language development in general and their speaking development in particular. To the best of the researcher's knowledge, only one study has been conducted in the Egyptian context to investigate student teachers' beliefs towards TBI.

Commentary on the Previous Related Studies

That is, only one study was conducted to examine the impact of TBI on students' speaking performance, and one study was conducted to investigate teachers' beliefs about TBI. This study aimed to investigate TBI as an effective teaching strategy to improve the speaking performance of high school students in the Egyptian context.

Research Approach

The Mixed-Methods Research Approach

They also argued that the quantitative research approach has its shortcomings as it is unable to provide an in-depth description of some of the issues under investigation, while the qualitative research approach is disadvantageous as it does not provide accurate data of a statistical nature on the issues addressed. Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 3) added that the qualitative research approach is used when "attempting to understand or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people give them".

The Pragmatic Paradigm

For them, a research paradigm forms the principles that govern the way a researcher sees the world and the way he/she behaves and controls the surrounding world. To clarify, research paradigms are the lenses that help scholars and research look at the world and the different types of research methodologies in order to choose the most appropriate one in light of the research questions and the research objectives and that help determine how research data in a specific domain is collected and analyzed.

Figure 4: The Three Elements of a Research Paradigm Ontology

Research Methods

Research Site
Research Material
Research Sampling
Research Instruments

The Quantitative Tools and Treatment Procedure
The Qualitative Semi-Structured Interview Tool

Third, and more importantly, the survey sample appears to be a representative sample of the accessible population (10% of 1000 students). Second, this sample appeared to be a representative sample of the accessible population (10% of the quantitative sample).