LRC Invited Speaker: Dr. Marta González-Lloret

TBLT in the Distance Language Classroom
with Dr. Marta González-Lloret
University of Hawai’i at Manoa

As most teaching practitioners have had the chance to experience this year, technology can facilitate learning, including language learning. However, without a sound methodological base for the development of our curriculum and activities, technology is just a vehicle, and not the effective tool it can be. This talk advocates that a technology-mediated task-based curriculum is an effective organizing framework for online and hybrid language courses. I will first review key concepts such as task, technology-mediated tasks, and pedagogic tasks. Participants will then learn how to select tasks for an online curriculum and how to sequence them based on previous existing SLA research. Several technologies and activities will then be proposed as tasks that can be adopted and adapted for different languages and at different levels. Finally, the presentation will address some of the challenges of implementing TBLT in online environments and will suggest ways to overcome them.

Recommended reading:
González-Lloret, Marta. “Technology for task‐based language teaching.” The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning (2017): 234-247.