Serveis Lingüístics de Barcelona

Until the 31st of December, you are still in time to benefit from the 10% discount on our acclaimed Task-Based Language Teaching course starting on January 19th 2024. You can sign up and find more information, including dates, content, and guest tutors.

https://learn.slb.coop/product/tblt-from-theory-to-practice-jan24/

If you have any questions, or would like to talk to us about the course, please book a free no-obligation meeting with one of our team here.

https://calendly.com/alan-kl0/tblt-info-session?month=2023-12

Please remember that if you can’t commit to the whole course, you can choose to take a single module.

Feedback from past participants has been excellent, including this comment from a recent graduate.

Wishing you festive greetings and all the best for the coming year. We hope to see you on the course in 2024!

We will shortly be interviewing Marta Gonzalez-Lloret for our next episode about her pioneering work on technology-mediated . Marta is an accomplished scholar and guest tutor on our online TBLT course starting in January (https://lnkd.in/dHtPVjJ6)

If anyone has any questions for Marta about teaching with tasks in general, or specifically about teaching language through technologies, please let us know in the comments!

Feedback like this is exactly why we keep running our online tutored course on Task-Based Language Teaching ( )!

Our course helped Claudia refine her task-based course for students of Spanish at the University of Illinois, Chicago. As program director, Claudia is in an ideal position to influence change in language program design, and went with TBLT because of its communicative focus and harmony with what we know about language acquisition.

However, our course is also popular with chalkface teachers who might not be able to design and implement a whole TBLT course on their own, but want to improve student engagement and communicative competence in the face of generic grammar-focused approaches that aren't working too well.

We take all our course participants through each stage of TBLT, from Needs Analysis and task design up to how to facilitate and evaluate task performance. Along the way, we benefit from the insights of expert guest tutors at the cutting edge of TBLT research and practice - including Roger Gilabert from the University of Barcelona and Marta Gonzalez-Lloret from the University of Hawaii.

Our next course starts mid-January 2024 - please visit https://lnkd.in/dHtPVjJ6 for more information and to take advantage of our subscriber discounts. Meanwhile, feel free to ask us anything in the comments below!

It will soon be three years since the great Michael H. Long passed. Mike is perhaps best known as a pioneer of Task-Based Language Teaching ( ), a fundamentally student-centred and communicative approach which he defended so eloquently in the 2015 book Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching.

At Serveis Lingüístics de Barcelona we were first persuaded to adopt Mike's version of TBLT by Geoff Jordan, a good friend of Mike's who later introduced me to him and got him involved in our online TBLT course for teachers. It was incredible that someone of Mike's stature within the applied field would collaborate with a small, teacher-led such as SLB. But then again, Mike was a staunch supporter of cooperatives - he had written extensively about the Mondragon co-ops, for example - and had also fallen in love with Barcelona over many visits.

Mike's TBLT is distinct from other versions in two key aspects. One is his inclusion of a thorough needs analysis to identify the 'target tasks' most relevant to students, on which the course is then based. And secondly, Mike's TBLT is unapologetically 'strong', which is to say, fundamentally based on the learners' capacity to acquire and develop language through doing things with it. He reserved form-focused instruction (i.e. work on grammar, pronunciation etc.) for reactive feedback to communication difficulties which arise in task performance. And he insisted that evaluation of task completion should be based on task criteria alone, rather than linguistic ones.

Do we agree with every detail of Mike's TBLT? We don't - we recognise, for example, that TBLT can still be successfully adopted where a detailed, pre-course needs analysis is not possible. And we are still grappling with the best ways to evaluate task performance, as well as other sticky issues in TBLT studies, such as how to sequence tasks in a syllabus according to complexity.

But what Mike left us with is a blueprint for the future of language teaching - the best-argued, most detailed, and most convincing alternative to the synthetic, top-down, 'structure-of-the-day' approach which still dominates today. We are lucky to have had his input, and his voice continues to educate and entertain our course participants through the video and audio recordings we were able to make of him - for which, just by the way, he never charged us a cent.

Some links:

Mike's last book, a compelling polemic on language teaching co-authored with Geoff, is here: https://bitly.ws/34N2k
Our podcast interview with Mike is here: https://bitly.ws/34N5d
Our podcast tribute to Mike, with collaborations from scholars who knew him well such as Geoff, Roger Gilabert and Marta Gonzalez-Lloret, is here: https://bitly.ws/34N5K
And our TBLT course featuring contributions from Mike is here: https://bitly.ws/34MMf

Our fifth online tutored course on Task-Based Lanuage Teaching (TBLT), starting January 2024, is now open for enrolment! The course is aimed at teachers and course designers wishing to upgrade their knowledge of this evidence-backed communicative approach, with an eye to designing and implementing dynamic language courses based on relevant and engaging tasks.

Click through for more information, and sign up to our TBLT newsletter for exclusive subscriber-only discounts.

More details coming soon!

https://lnkd.in/dHtPVjJ6

¡Reserva la fecha!

¡Hola a todos! Espero que os encontréis bien.

Es un placer invitaros a nuestro próximo evento de desarrollo profesional en Barcelona.

Del 14 al 16 de noviembre, de 10:00 a 13:00, celebraremos un evento de formación sobre la enseñanza de idiomas basada en tareas junto con nuestros socios europeos del proyecto financiado por Erasmus+ TBL4Tourism.

El objetivo del evento es

1. Presentar un nuevo curso online sobre TBLT, enfocado al sector profesional, desarrollado por los socios del proyecto.

2. Orientar a los participantes sobre los principales
enfoque para que puedan aplicar y/o mejorar la enseñanza de idiomas basada en tareas en sus propios contextos.

3. 3. Capacitar a los participantes para que organicen sus propios
talleres de desarrollo profesional sobre este tema en sus propios contextos.

El acto tendrá lugar en el barrio de Sants de Barcelona y es gratuito, pero las plazas son limitadas.

Para reservar tu plaza, envíanos un correo electrónico a [email protected] antes del 1 de noviembre y, si eres seleccionado, te enviaremos todos los detalles. Para más información, ponte en contacto con [email protected].

Save the date!

Hello everyone! I hope this finds you all well.

It's a pleasure to invite you to our next professional development event in Barcelona.

From the 14th to the 16th of November, from 10am to 1pm, we will be holding a training event on Task-Based Language Teaching together with our European partners in the Erasmus+ funded project TBL4Tourism.

The aim of the event is to

1. Present a new online course on TBLT, focused on the vocational sector, developed by the project partners.

2. Guide participants through the main aspects of this
approach to enable them to implement and/or improve task-based language teaching in their own contexts

3. Enable participants to run their own professional
development workshops on this topic in their own contexts.

The event will take place in the Sants district of Barcelona and is free of charge, but places are limited.

To book your sit, pleased and emial to [email protected] before 1st of November and, if you are selected, we will send you all the details.

https://tbl4tourism.eu/

Two little pieces of news from us!

First up, Neil McMillan will be joining Teresa Bestwick tomorrow (December 15th) at 1pm CET to talk about taking a task-based approach to language exam preparation, with a particular focus on the Cambridge suite of exams. You can follow this via the TEFL Development Hub page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thetefldevelopmenthub/

Secondly, new SLB member and language teacher Tshiung Han See, based in , has written a post on the learn.SLB blog. It's all about his motivations for taking our online tutored course on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), starting in January! Read all about it via the link below, and if you fancy joining Han, follow the links there.

https://learn.slb.coop/putting-tblt-on-the-map-a-malaysian-perspective/

This is just one of the nuggets provided by Dr. Roger Gilabert in our 'Ask Me Anything' session on Task-Based Language Teaching last Friday!

The full recording of a fascinating Q&A on is now available at https://learn.slb.coop/ask-me-anything-about-tblt-with-roger-gilabert/.

Follow the links on that page if you are interested in our next online tutored TBLT course starting in January - where Roger is just one of the tutors helping us to shift from being traditional language teachers to facilitators of effective language learning!

Tomorrow, December 2nd at 4pm CET we will host an online Ask Me Anything session about Task-Based Language Teaching with expert researcher and practitioner Roger Gilabert!

For more details about Roger and how to participate, please see https://learn.slb.coop/ask-me-anything-about-tblt-with-roger-gilabert/

Meanwhile, anyone can submit a question for Roger, or upvote a question already submitted, by visiting www.slido.com and entering the code #1864146.

And finally, it's the last day for early-bird prices on our next online TBLT course - on which Roger is a valued contributer! We start in January with a great group of participants already signed up - why not join them? See https://learn.slb.coop/product/tblt-from-theory-to-practice-jan23/

"Ask me anything" about TBLT with Roger Gilabert - learn.slb Roger Gilabert Guerrero is a renowned expert on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), a valued member of the SLB cooperative and a guest tutor on our next online TBLT course beginning […]

Another testimonial! It's so good to know our course had such a positive impact on Sam's teaching practice. We know this will have had enormous benefits for his language students too, and that is why we do this!

If, like Sam, you want to:

*understand more about TBLT
*put your students' needs at the centre by taking your classes in a more holistic, task-based direction
*learn how to design and implement a full task-based course

.. then please check out our next online tutored course starting in January!

More info via:
https://learn.slb.coop/product/tblt-from-theory-to-practice-jan23/

This is just one of the glowing testimonials about out online tutored task-based language teaching course, which starts again in January!

Our expert team is ready to help another cohort through the process of designing their own dynamic TBLT courses. Our main aim is to give teachers and course designers the tools to meet their learners' needs, using a proven methodology in harmony with second language acqusition processes.

Whether your context is academic like Paul's, in another specialised area like business English, or language for general use for kids, teens or adults, our course has something for you.

The early-bird price is available all November - for full details, see https://learn.slb.coop/product/tblt-from-theory-to-practice-jan23/