Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching in the Teaching of English Morphology

In many countries where English is being taught as a foreign language, the teaching of  English is viewed to enhancing international communication.  However, Edward and Willis (2005) argue that the examination system in these countries often put a premium on formal accuracy, and as a result, teachers often prioritize the teaching of forms or patterns of a language learning. Sometimes teachers model the target language forms and get students to repeat them and  then ask questions intended to elicit the target forms in students' response.  

 Having come to the realization that each learner has his/her own style, personality, needs, and so forth,  it follows that a single teaching method or approach might not be appropriate and adequate for all the learners in the classroom.  Hence, interesting and appropriate drills  can be exploited for helping the learner take sufficient practice. However, as controlled practice having mechanical drills may sometimes be boring as my experience engaged in teaching and learning. This type of practice cannot ensure the learner's communicative ability, the teacher should involve the learner in some meaningful, purposive and communicative activities, such as role-play, pair work, group work, etc to make learning interesting and motivating.                                                                

It is true that many task-based teachers like learners to work in pairs or groups. This is generally because this gives learners more opportunities to use the language  for themselves. Doing a task in pairs or groups has a number of advantages. It gives learners confidence to try out whatever language they know, or think they know, in the relative privacy of a pair or small group, without fear of being wrong or of being corrected in front of the class.  It also can help learners gradually gain confidence as they find they can rely on cooperation with their fellow students to achieve the goal of the tasks. Willis & Willis (2007) explain that it is more effective to encourage learner to use the language as much as possible, even if this means that some of the language they produce is inaccurate. This meaning-based approach allow teachers to provide learners with opportunities in the classroom to use the language for genuine communication.  When the teacher offer the learner formalized activities to facilitate their participation in meaningful activities, thus they are engaging in Task-Based Learning.                                                                                                             Willis & Willis (2007) states that task-based learning is a development on CLT ( Communicative Language teaching) in that it lays emphasis on the design of tasks and the development of task-based teaching. So the teacher create tasks to facilitate meaningful ativities in the classroom. Tasks are not a substitute for interesting topics which engage learners' interest, but they can enhance that engagement and interest.                                                                                           

English language learning occurs in the formal situation of a classroom, and the learner has hardly any access to the target language beyond the classroom door (Brown,  2001). And in this formal situation, learners receive instruction and practises in the items entirely related to the basic skills of the target language- listening, speaking, reading and writing. That is, the items taught and learned are linguistically related to and considered at different levels of  phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. While learning the English language, the learners usually encounters varied linguistic problems that evidently handicap and hamper their learning and eventually negatively affect their general proficiency as well. This phenomenon is also found in the learning of English Morphology subject as one of the linguistics field. The knowledge of pedagogy, on the other hand, gives the teachers insight about how to facilitate the classroom techniques to make their teaching more effective and interesting to the students. There will not be any good learning process unless the materials and teaching techniques are attractive and appropriate for them.

Furthermore, (Scarcella  & Oxford, 1992) as cited in Oxford, R.L (2006) state that Interest level of the learners in the material is particularly crucial. If materials are perceived as boring or as too easy or too difficult, learners will be unmotivated to do the tasks. This problematic issue driving me to conduct a research in order to facilitate meaningful activities in the classroom with  propose Task-based Language Learning in   the Teaching of  English Morphology.

 

METHODS

This research is designed as qualitative case study research which involved the observation and interview. The research site is determined based on where the phenomenon occurs. I choose Forth Grade Morphology Class on the English Department of Faculty of Letters and Culture Gorontalo State University as the setting of the study. Such selection also meant that I need to invite my colleagues to be the participants. As I have known my colleagues for quite a while, mutual trust and confidence would be build between interviewer and interviewees. In choosing the research's participant, this research especially intended to choose the participants which are engaged in Morphology subject in English Department  at State University of  Gorontalo. The participant is covering lecturers and students which are engaged in Morphology subject. There are three lecturers and  five students as the participant in this research.

              The data was collected through observation and interview. Qualitative observation defines as those activities in which the researcher taking the field notes, on the behavior or individuals activity at the site decided based on the research plan (Creswell, 2009,  p.181). Meanwhile, after the observation is perfectly conducted, then the interview with lecturers and students is carried out.

After all data have been organized well, the next step is the analysis preparation. This step is carried out both when the data organization is carried out and after it has already been organized for once again to make sure that the data has already been in the right categorization. Before the data interpreted, it is first correlated and interrelated based on each theme and its description. Thus, from overall step of data analysis previously, it can be seen whether each categorization of the theme have already been met with the data requirement of the research.

The last step was interpreting the meaning of each theme. Before the data are displayed in the next chapter, it is interpreted first based on the category and indicators of interview, observation and the data which have been gathered from examining the thesis.