Chapter I. New direction of teaching foreign language in Uzbekistan

1.2 Using pedagogical approaches in teaching language.
Task-based language teaching is a pedagogical approach that requires students to be actively participating in the process to accomplish a task. This approach is known for promoting real-world tasks that students may encounter outside of the classroom and thus such tasks are considered to be more authentic and meaningful for students. Besides, this pedagogical approach stimulates students to apply a range of language skills alongside metacognitive, communicative and learning strategies, a combination of which is critical to “do” a task. Students’ engagement is understood in my article as a sum of two components: motivation and active learning. Students are truly engaged in learning when they are genuinely motivated to invest their efforts into completing a task in order to obtain or to practice new knowledge and skills and when the task is meaningful for them in terms of their educational plans or learning outcomes. Following Barkley in this volume, active learning is defined as one of the two characteristics of students’ engagement technique, when “students are dynamic participants in their learning and that they are reflecting on and monitoring both the processes and the results of their learning”.Increasing students’ engagement in classroom realia might be an ongoing challenge for many teachers as teaching does not guarantee learning, while learning may occur without teaching. Barkley, quoting Shulman, stated in her work: “Learning begins with students’ engagement”, placing this construct at the very foundation of learning. Thus, both elements: motivation and active learning should be integral parts of any pedagogical approach. With this in view, TBLT can be a good response that offers opportunities for a meaningful interaction among learners to fulfill the task and it provides conditions where learners can activate their previous knowledge and connect it with new information and skills and at the same time may contribute to the development of better learner’s autonomy, competence and relatedness that, in its turn can motivate students to take on challenges that correlate with their learning goals. The following task represents a task-based language teaching approach that is designed to engage students into meaningful language production on the example of usage of present simple tense for the description of processes and daily routines. The name of the task is Do It Yourself (DIY) Project. It aims to engage students into natural language use both in and outside of the classroom context. The expected outcomes articulated for the task stipulate that students will be able to describe a process in logical and sequential way using present simple tense. Through the task student will develop productive skills: speaking and writing. The immediate language in focus is the usage and meaning of present simple tense. It is expected that by the end of the task students will be able to describe a process in logical and sequential way using present simple tense. The overall lesson objective was to engage students into natural language use both in and outside of the classroom context. Though I used this task for my elementary students, it can be adapted for learners of any level. The total amount of time required to complete the task is distributed between before, in and after the lesson. Before and after the lesson students are offered to learn at their own pace to get acquainted with the material provided by the teacher and accomplish home assignment, while the total time is estimated for in-class participation is 45 minutes. The lesson starts with a warm-up activity, where I ask students to think over what they are good at. They are asked to provide examples of something that they can teach others to do. Students volunteer to share their thoughts and ideas with the rest of the class one by one. This stage allows students to activate their schemata, to retrieve necessary information from their previous experience, to get themselves prepared for processing new information about the topic, which is provided during the input part of the lesson.⁵ Actually, before sharing their ideas students have to reflect on their experiences and make a quick comparison analysis to choose the one that they are really skillful in. In addition, this pre-task activity enables a teacher to elicit free non-controlled speech and to evaluate students’ productive skills in terms of the usage of target language. It is not safe to say that students will learn just by listening to their peers speaking, but it helps them make self- evaluation of their project skills and plan their responses better. Estimated amount of time spent for pre-task activity is 5-7 minutes. Once the warm-up activity is over, I move to a teaching part (input).For this lesson it is a short video, ideally prepared by a teacher, that demonstrates a process of how to do something in a sequential order using present simple tense. I did a video describing how to make a sandwich. Here is the link to my teaching video. I made a specific emphasis on the vocabulary such as first, then, next, after that and finally that are to scaffold learners through a demonstration process and later on to help them during the production phase. This part of the lesson aims to model the expected outcome and to help students notice important steps of the demonstration process, like giving a project a proper name, planning ingredients if needed, commentary to the demonstration, the logical sequence of the process itself.