Teaching beginner learners of French through input-based tasks

You’re warmly invited to the Centre for Language Education Research (CLER) welcome event and first seminar of 2018/19:

Dr Rosemary Erlam: Teaching beginner learners of French through input-based tasks

This talk describes a study that investigated the effectiveness of input-based language tasks with beginner learners of French. An aim of the study was to investigate the common criticism that task-based language teaching is not suitable for beginner learners. Year 9 students (aged 13 years) completed a series of tasks that were designed to help them acquire incidentally new vocabulary and markers of plurality (i.e., des, sont). The tasks were taught by their regular French teacher. The students were given no grammatical explanation about these structures. Results show that the students learnt to both understand and produce the new vocabulary even though they had not had the opportunity to produce it in class. They also show that they learnt to understand but not produce the new grammatical structures. This study is interesting because it addresses a number of issues:
whether task-based language teaching can be used effectively with beginner learners
whether grammatical explanations are essential for learning
to what extent an input-based approach facilitates language learning

Dr Rosemary Erlam is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland. Her research interests include second language acquisition, task-based language teaching, language teacher education and language assessment. Rosemary was formerly a French language teacher and much of her research has been conducted in the foreign language teaching context. Until recently she was Academic Director of the Transforming Practice  in Language Teaching (TPLT) project, a one year long programme aiming to equip teachers to more effectively teach languages other than English in the New Zealand school system.

The talk will be followed by a drinks reception hosted by the new Director of the Centre for Language Education Research (CLER), Professor Maggie Kubanyiova. CLER is part of the School of Education, University of Leeds.

The event is open to all, but please let us know if you’re planning to attend by emailing M.Kubanyiova@leeds.ac.uk. Please also circulate this to any contacts who might be interested.