Outcomes and Impact

Teaching, Learning and Assessment

The most striking effect of the approach was the engagement and involvement of the learners. They became caught up and directed by the tasks: it was the tasks themselves that motivated and made demands of the learners calling them into being as learners and creators of the class. The most immediate jolting aspect of this approach took place in the Deaf English classes through the seemingly simple task of writing and posting a letter to someone. As the tutor said:

They all struggled to grasp that I was asking them to do something real and actually wanted them to write and post the letter.

a new Pudsey Bear logo to reflect deaf people

The learners would normally have had someone else do this for them. They were also struck by their need to role play communicating with a non-BSL using post-office worker. However, once thrown into the task, the learners found a way to communicate, particularly those who had struggled with the more abstract tasks of non-TBL classes. They began to develop strategies for communicating with hearing people. (See Appendix 2)

This strategy-building was also manifest in the Children in Need project. Within the fundraising, some learners set themselves the challenge of communicating with hearing strangers asking for directions without the aid of phones or writing, and of creating and editing a video of the process. The demands of the task overall effected a generative creativity – setting up a Just Giving webpage, creating a new Pudsey Bear logo to reflect deaf people, printing the logo on t-shirts to wear during the challenge, baking a Pudsey Bear cake, writing to the BBC and raising £395. Learners even extended the task to outside class time. One group spent a whole Sunday working with a videographer friend on their video, while another learner, usually reticent about homework, made a video of himself at work doing story-time with some hearing children whilst he used signs and no voice. He was amazed how well they could understand each other.

Similarly striking, if less dramatic, were the effects of task-oriented learning on the hearing

Our learner led bake sale.

Level 1 English learners, in particular how they engaged with each other’s work on music reviews on an extremely intimate level, open to each other’s comments and exchanging views.

The task-based targets were in many ways more challenging. Learners found it particularly difficult to move away from a solely linguistic focus such as “I need to improve my phrasal verbs.” However, when learners did contextualise, their tasks became enriched and purposeful such as researching and presenting ‘how to improve my English in four months’, ‘what I need to do in order to apply for an NHS apprenticeship’, and ‘how to become a stand-up comedian’. One learner translated her own poems into English, another sang a song in English, another joined a cycling club and another researched how to become a teaching assistant and found such a job. Learners needed to determine the steps they had to take to complete their tasks. (See Appendices 3.2, 3.3, 3.4)

Organisational Development

This project enabled us to explore in concrete detail what task-based learning entails. We have been working on this approach for three years. The pedagogical intent has become clear. However, this research was very much tutor-led, thrived on exchange and has effected a practical comprehension of how TBL is not the ‘production’ part of presentation-practice-production (PPP). The discourse of TBL is now much better instituted, allowing debate and discussion cross-centre.

Tutors have led a dissemination session and are well-placed to work with other tutors on how to develop this approach across the provision. A key aspect of the project has been how tutors in the hearing and Deaf area have collaborated and how enthusiastically most Deaf learners responded to tasks. Although TBL has been practised in the hearing classes for a while, this practice was far less prevalent in Deaf English and maths. Now, this provision can be seen to be leading the way.

Finally, an outcome of the project is likely to be a different way in which we carry out Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) at least on some courses, to enable a more organic approach. Tutors developed plans to reflect more readily a TBL pedagogy and we will move forward with these in 2022-23.

The most important learning from the project is that task-based learning and target-setting are effective in enabling learners to develop the key life and work skills they need to participate and make progress in a democratic society. We learned that, when the task is right, learners will create and run with the activity, will learn, and will support each other through the task accomplishment. In so doing, learners will achieve well beyond the constraints of more traditional classroom ambitions and that it is not necessary to separate off linguistic elements from the context which demands their use.

In addition, we learned that a move away from the fixation on the ‘SMARTness’ of targets and a focus on the purposes of learners’ learning – the types of activities they need to do not as vehicles for language improvement but as ends in themselves – produced work that was interesting and engaging for learners and gave them a sense of achievement.

Most significantly, we discovered what the idea of TBL is and how it can work.

However, we also learned that we have a lot more to discover, investigate and discuss. Questions which have emerged from the research include:

• How exactly are TBL classes set up so that the task is not solely a practice of, or a vehicle for, a language form but something that occasions discovery and learning? What is the balance between meaning and form? What is the role of staging?
• Why might the same task produce a lot of work and creativity with one group but not with another?
• How to set up classes so that learners can decide more readily on their task-based targets. What pre-task activities facilitate this and obviate the teacher’s telling or explaining what these types of tasks are?
• How can learners more readily articulate their aims in terms of social practices rather than linguistic forms and how can they better join means to ends? (See Appendix 3.5)
• How well does TBL work for pre-entry groups? What form if any should it take? (See Appendix 3.6).