ELT in Brazil

Cassi Wogel is a teacher who took one of my (and Walter’s) courses on TBL – Breaching the ELT Matrix – and wrote to me with a couple of questions. With Cassi’s consent, I’m here sharing this interaction because I feel it can give teachers a more practical view on how to apply Task-Based Learning in their classes.

Here’s what Cassi wrote me:

Hi Bruno,
I’m Cassiano, a 37-year-old English teacher currently living in Rondônia. I’ve been teaching for about 10 years, with the last 3 being exclusively online. I mostly teach adults in one-to-one classes, and I’m looking to take on duos and small groups soon.

I’m writing to you because I’ve been watching your (and Walter’s) course on TBL and Dogme (Breaching the ELT Matrix). First of all, thank you for the amazing content you and Wagner put together. I also loved the fact that it was done in a conversational format and that you sometimes disagree. When two experts can be seen interacting in that way, it makes the whole experience much more down-to-earth.

I haven’t gotten to the Dogme part yet, but what you covered in the course (and also in your own blog posts) about TBL has shown me that this approach is what I’ve been looking for for a long time.

It couldn’t be otherwise–especially in one-to-one teaching, what you need is a robust way of working that allows you to tackle students’ needs straight away while keeping classes dynamic and engaging. The way you teach your students under TBL (as I’ve experienced through your writing) goes hand-in-hand with my aspirations for what language teaching should look like.

That being said, one thing that I missed from the course was more examples of how target tasks could be broken down into a series of practice tasks. When push comes to shove–especially since we teachers are so prone to thinking in terms of exercises rather than tasks–it can be particularly challenging to lay out a lesson plan that fully encompasses this vision. As a teacher, I felt like I needed more “input” (in the sense of real examples rather than more theory).

So the real reason I’m writing to you is because I want to try it out with one of my students, and I would love it if you could give me an example of how you would conceive some of these tasks if that’s not too much of a hassle! I could actually share my own thoughts right off the bat, but I don’t want this email to be excruciatingly long. I’ll quickly explain the case I’ve got in my hands:

My student is an anesthesiologist who needs to brush up on his English. During our needs analysis interview, he told me his main goal is to use his English more naturally during his trips abroad. Together, we put together a list of situations in which he wants to sound more spontaneous and natural, which include asking for information, going to restaurants, shopping, etc.

Here are my questions. Should I treat each one of these situations as a separate target task? If I understand correctly, the number of practice tasks will also depend on how far he is from his goal, correct? We haven’t had our first class yet, so let’s say I start with shopping (at a store). What could be an initial sequence of practice tasks (that could be later adapted as I learn more about him, of course) leading up to the target task? 

Once again, I’m sorry if I’m asking too much, but I feel that if you could offer an example that connects with my real-life challenge right now, it would give me deeper insight into how to apply this approach.

Thank you so much for being such an inspiring figure in the ELT world!

Sincerely
Cassiano

---

Here’s what I replied:

Hi Cassiano!
Thank you for the kind words about the course and blog posts! I’m happy to hear (read?) that they have been helpful to you and hopefully your students soon.

TBL and DOGME are two very interesting and much more democratic approaches to ELT, I’m glad they resonate with your teaching philosophy and beliefs as well.

Let’s get down to it. You mentioned in your email that you missed a couple more practical examples of (1) lesson design and (2) how target tasks can be broken down into practice tasks. It makes more sense to begin with (2) as it refers to course design – we’ll go from macro to micro.

The situations you describe look more like themes and functions rather than target tasks, but we can definitely work with them. Let’s take Going to Restaurants, for example. At the restaurant, your student will have to (a) call and make a reservation, (b) interact with the receptionist to find a seat, (c) read the menu, (d) interact with the waiter/waitress, and (e) chit-chat with a friend at the restaurant. All of these can be seen as individual target tasks. These are what your student wants to do with the language, hence target tasks.

You could design a learning unit around Going to Restaurants, having target tasks a-e as unit objectives. See how different the approach is to an atomistic, focus-on-forms one? We’re not targeting specific individual grammar points or vocabulary items but real-life language use. Your course would look like this now:

Unit: Going to Restaurants
Target task 1: Call and make a reservation	Target task 2: Interact with the receptionist to find a seat	Target task 3: Read the menu	Target task 4: Interact with the waiter/waitress	Target task 5: Chit-chat with a friend at the restaurant

Now, the next step is scaffolding the learning experience so your student moves smoothly from where he is closer to the target tasks. Let’s design Target Task 1: Call and make a reservation. When designing tasks, it is often useful to keep in mind the different types/characteristics of tasks. These are:

Input-focused x Output-focused
Here-and-now x There-and-then
Closed x Open
Focused x Unfocused

The types on the left side of the pairs above are usually easier than their counterparts. That said, an input-focused, here-and-now, closed, focused task is often easier than an output-focused, there-and-then, open, unfocused task. One way of imagining the scaffolding of practice tasks is to play around with these descriptors to make sure you balance the level of challenge and support for your learner.

With that said, our first practice task for our first objective, Target task 1, could be:

Ask DeepSeek to write a dialogue between a customer and a receptionist in which the customer is calling to make a reservation. Make sure you tell the AI the level of your learner and then ask it to produce the dialogue at a level above. Then, ask a friend to record this dialogue with you or use another AI to produce speech (there are some out there, but I love recording material for my students!). The task is: The student listens to the conversation and takes notes of the reservation as if they are the receptionist.

For the next task (and next class), bring a similar dialogue in text with the sentences out of order and have the student organize the dialogue. After they’re done, you can role-play the dialogue with them and, depending on their level, improvise along the way.

Next, find a video online of the situation and repeat task 1 with a more authentic audio. Get the transcription of the video so the student can listen and read after the first attempt.

For the next task, ask the student to turn their camera off, turn yours off too, and role-play calling a restaurant to make a reservation. This task is very similar to the target task and would likely be the last one in this cycle. You can include more input-focused or output-focused tasks depending on the level of your learner. You can also actually perform the target task with the student by asking them to call and make a reservation at a real restaurant here in Brazil, where they speak English.

Your course would look like this now:

Unit: Going to Restaurants
Target task 1: Call and make a reservation	Target task 2: Interact with the receptionist to find a seat	Target task 3: Read the menu	Target task 4: Interact with the waiter/waitress	Target task 5: Chit-chat with a friend at the restaurant
Call a real restaurant and make a reservation
Role-play how to make a reservation
Watch the interaction and take notes of the reservation
Order the dialogue and role-play
Listen and take notes of the reservation

This objective seems feasible in around 5 classes, doesn’t it? Again, you might need more or fewer classes depending on your student’s level and the challenge of the task.

On lesson design (1), this is how I usually teach my classes through TBL:

Lead-in: Set the theme of the lesson, ask the student a question to get them in the mood for speaking English, and activate prior knowledge on the topic.

Task: Set the text, give instructions, and allow the student some time to do the task. As they do it, take notes on their production (if any) for feedback and work on emergent language. Also, pay attention to interesting language in the input you’d like to highlight to students in case they don’t notice it.

Feedback on task: Elicit the ‘answer’ for the task or wrap up the task. Ask the student if the strategy they used to approach the task worked and how they think they performed. Give the student some feedback, work on the language they produced (expand, correct, sophisticate), and highlight any piece of interesting language the student didn’t notice.

Task expansion: Sometimes, you can expand the task and work harder on it. For example, if the student listened to an audio they can always listen again and now read the script to circle 8 bits of language they find interesting (not new, not difficult, interesting!) and then report to you. Ask them why they circled what they circled and help them put these to use in other contexts.

Task repetition: If time allows and you find it relevant, it might be a good idea to get students to repeat the task after they receive feedback on it. Students will always perform better the second time around and have the opportunity to put your golden feedback to use!

Wrap-up: Give students some final feedback, focus on their development and task achievement, and assign some fun homework for the next class.

I hope this answers your questions and helps you design your course! Get in touch should you have any more questions; I’d love to answer them!

Cheers,
Bruno Albuquerque

---

I hope this helps teachers who are interested in a more flexible, holistic, democratic, communicative approach to language teaching find their way through TBL and DOGME.

Happy teaching!