2. Is TBLT still a popular teaching approach today?

TBLT has been growing fast since the 1980s. Van den Branden et al. (2009) commented that TBLT is being advocated in many contexts across the globe as “a potentially very powerful language pedagogy” (p. 1). The evidence is increasing that there is global uptake of TBLT ideas, and TBLT is now officially endorsed in a number of countries.

Bygate (2020) informed us that, four decades after the earliest publications, TBLT remains “a topic of lively interest and debate” (p. 284). TBLT also remains a “contested endeavour” (East, 2017, p. 412), seen by several stakeholders as “still a relatively recent innovation” (Long, 2016, p. 28).

References:

Bygate, M. (2020). Some directions for the possible survival of TBLT as a real world project. Language Teaching, 53(3), 275–288.

East, M. (2017). Research into practice: The task-based approach to instructed second language acquisition. Language Teaching, 50(3), 412–424.

Long, M. (2016). In defense of tasks and TBLT: Nonissues and real issues. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 36, 5–33.

Van den Branden, K., Bygate, M., & Norris, J. (2009). Task-based language teaching: Introducing the reader. In K. Van den Branden, M. Bygate, & J. Norris (Eds.), Taskbased language teaching: A reader (pp. 1–13). John Benjamins.