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21 - Task-Based Language Learning

from Part V - Pedagogical Interventions and Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2019

By
Michael H. Long ,
Jiyong Lee  and
Kyoko Kobayashi Hillman
Edited by
John W. Schwieter  and
Alessandro Benati
John W. Schwieter
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Alessandro Benati
Affiliation:
American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
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Summary

The psycholinguistic rationale proposed for TBLT varies somewhat, but is usually an amalgam of cognitive-interactionist and usage-based theories (see, e.g., Long, 2015a, pp. 30–62; Robinson, 2007, 2015; Skehan, 1998, 2015) developed with language learning as the explanandum. When students are adults, whose capacity for purely incidental learning, especially instance learning, is weaker than in young children, a variety of devices is required to enhance incidental learning and thereby speed up the process. The enhancements seek to help learners either detect or notice new items in the input by increasing their perceptual saliency and by drawing learners’ attention to needed lexis and collocations and grammatical patterns, especially when non-salient forms and form–function or form–meaning relationships are concerned. However, most of the attention-drawing procedures are deployed in response to learner performance, not in advance, as in synthetic approaches.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning , pp. 500 - 526
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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