Task-based learning and the oral language production

Abstract

The twentieth century has brought many changes in our lives, including a new viewpoint on online education, modern platforms, and tools that let us be creative in teaching. The study looked at the analysis of impact of authentic task-based learning activities to develop oral language production. Task-based learning is one of the most popular and current methods that focuses primarily in communicative activities. A sample of 44 students from 10th grade from Unidad Educativa Atahualpa was used, learners received classes through online and face-to-face modalities from September 2021 to July 2022. This study lasted four weeks and used a quasi-experimental design and a quantitative method. A pre-test and post-test assessment were used to assess the effectiveness of authentic tasks to develop oral language output in L2, and the Cambridge FLYERS speaking exam A2, and its rubric. Experts in the field validated two surveys that were applied to teachers and learners to collect data. Furthermore, the statistics tools used for this study were Wilcoxon statistics to compare the dependent samples, Mann-Whitney for the independent samples, Shapiro- Wilk normality test, and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 25 software were used to verify the hypothesis. Finally, according to this study, students' oral production of the experimental group improved significantly and showed a progress from 5.3 to 9.6 average score after the treatment, meanwhile the control group average score increase from 7.5 to 8.2 using traditional .methods. It is evidenced that authentic task-based learning activities improved oral language production significantly overpassing the mean of the control group. The author emphasize the need to set a role to learner in a task to motive them