VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES
************************

LÊ THỊ THANH

APPLYING TASK-BASED APPROACH IN TEACHING ENGLISH
GRAMMAR: ACTION RESEARCH AT UNIVER ENGLISH CENTER
Áp dụng đường hướng dạy học thông qua nhiệm vụ để dạy ngữ pháp:
nghiên cứu hành động ở trung tâm Anh ngữ Univer

M.A. COMBINED PROGRAM THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60140111

HANOI – 2016


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES
************************

LÊ THỊ THANH

APPLYING TASK-BASED APPROACH IN TEACHING ENGLISH
GRAMMAR: ACTION RESEARCH AT UNIVER ENGLISH CENTER
Áp dụng đường hướng dạy học thông qua nhiệm vụ để dạy ngữ pháp:
nghiên cứu hành động ở trung tâm Anh ngữ Univer

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Duong
Thi Nu, for all the helpful support, guidance and encouragement she gave me while
I was conducting the research. I am truly grateful to her for her advice and
suggestions right from the beginning when this study was only on its formative
stage.
I would like to send my sincere thanks to all other teachers and lecturers at
Faculty of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies for all the valuable and priceless
knowledge and experience they have transferred to me and to all my students at
Univer English Center who have enthusiastically participated in the study. Without
their assistance, it would have been impossible for me to handle this work.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to my family and friends for all the support I
received to finish this thesis.

ii


ABSTRACT
Grammar plays a crucial role in English language learning and teaching,
establishing the ground for every other aspect of language. Yet the use of grammar
in practices such as writing and speaking is not flexible to many of the students.
Moreover, students get bored of the traditional approaches and quickly forget the
knowledge or get troubles applying it in real life. That is especially true for
university students of low level at Univer English Center who are seeking for better
English for their job in the future. Task-based approach designed with activities
around a focal task that is similar to the task in real world, promoting students to use
language into practical context to accomplish a specific purpose, is expected to be a
resolution to the dilemma.
This study is aimed at investigating the application of tasks in teaching
gr mm r to find out students’ opinionss towards grammar and learning grammar
through t sks, the extent to which the use of t sks to te ch gr mm r ffect students’

List of tables…………………………………………………………………

viii

PẢRT A: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………. 1
1. Rationale……………………………………………………………... 2
2. Aims and objectives of the study…………………………………… 3
3. Scopes of the study…………………………………………………..

3

4. Significance of the study…………………………………………….

3

5. Design of the study…………………………………………………... 3
PART D: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………. 5
1.1. Approaches in English Language Teaching……………………..

5

1.2. Task-based language teaching approach………………………… 8
1.2.1. R tion le……………………………………………………… 8
1.2.2. Definition of t sk……………………………………………... 11
1.2.3. Identifying t sk……………………………………………….. 16
1.2.4. Task types…………………………………………………….. 17

iv


41
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND
DISCUSSIONS…………………
3.1. What are learners’ opinions towards learning grammar
through tasks?.......................................................................................... 41
3.2. To what extent does the teaching of grammar through tasks
help learners acquire and use grammar?.............................................. 52
3.3. What are the constraints and obstacles to students in learning
grammar through tasks?......................................................................... 61
PART C: SUMMARY, RECOMMENDATIONS, AND
CONCLUSION…
1. Recapitulation………………………………………………………..

v

66

66


2. Recommendations…………………………………………………… 68
3. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research..…

72

4. Limitations of the study……………………………………………... 74
5. Conclusion …………………………………………………………...

76


ELT: English language teaching
PPP: Presentation-Practice-Production
FLT: Foreign language teaching
CLT: Communicative language teaching
SLA: Second language acquisition
GT: Grammar-Translation

vii


LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Figure 1: TBLT fr mework……………………………………………………

18

T ble 1: Students’ gener l inform tion1………………………………………

42

T ble 2: Students’ gener l inform tion 2……………………………………..

43

Figure 2: The degree of interest to students…………………………………… 44
Figure 3: The degree of important to students………………………………… 44
Figure 4: The degree of difficulty of grammatical structures
to students’ perceptiveness……………………………………………………

44


Table 4: Paired Sample T-test Statistics……………………………………….

52

Table 5: Paired Sampled T-test p-value……………………………………….. 54
T ble 6: Students’ difficulties in le rning gr mm r…………………………... 61

viii


PART A: INTRODUCTION

1.

Rationale
Grammar has been holding a crucial role in language learning and

cquisition, s Wood (1995) used to s y “nobody c n doubt th t

good knowledge

of the grammatical system is essential to master a foreign language and it is also one
of the most import nt p rts of communic tive competence”. It is greed th t without
comprehensive gr mm tic l knowledge, le rner’s l ngu ge development will be
limited. Learning and teaching language without grammar will lead to the fact that
students produce clumsy, inappropriate and meaningless sentences. Thus, grammar
is a framework without which language cannot be constructed and communication
cannot be performed smoothly and fluently. However, grammar teaching is still one
of the most controversial topics and remains hot in debate on language teaching.
In Vietnam, the teaching and learning of grammar seem to mainly focus on

The study aims at finding out new way to teach grammar to students

practically, to teach grammar via pedagogical tasks. Thus, as the title suggests, the
overarching aim of the study is to investigate the use of tasks in teaching grammar.
To get those aims achieved, the following objectives are meant to be filled:
-

To investigate students’ opinions towards grammar and grammar learning
through tasks

-

To ex mine the imp ct of t sks on students’ gr mm r le rning

-

To find out the constraints and obstacles to students in learning grammar
through tasks

-

To suggest some recommendations to make the application of tasks more
successfully and widely

3.

Scopes of the Study
The study is conducted in a 13-student English class for non-English major

students aging from 18-21 who are at elementary level of language and want to

relationship between the two are discussed along with the review of some
other approaches and previous studies

-

Chapter 2: Methodology
This chapter presents research questions, method, design, participants,
procedures and instruments as well as describes the cycles of action research

-

Chapter 3: Data analysis and discussions
Data collected are analyzed and discussions are made with regards to the
findings and analysis.

3


Part C: Summary, recommendations and conclusion
This

final

part

summarizes

the

research

professionals and linguists have developed intensively and extensively and formed a
really dynamic worldwide language community striving to improve the quality of
language teaching and learning. They have attempted to identify and examine
related key concepts and issues that shape the design and delivery of language
teaching (Richards and Renandya, 2010). In other words, it is the work of finding
more effective approaches and methods of language teaching.
In 19th century and the first part of 20th century, the Grammar-Translation
approach dominated foreign language teaching. The main focus of this approach is
carefully teaching students grammatical rules, followed by the practice of
translating sentences and texts. Students are strictly required to learn and memorize
grammatical rules, vocabulary, syntactic structures and translate literally the
sentences and texts. The method gives emphasis on reading and writing and very
little attention is paid to speaking and listening (J. C. R. Richards, Theodore S. ,
1995). Meanwhile, the grammar is taught deductively and vocabulary is taught in
lists of isolated words. The approach puts students under enormous pressure of
memorizing endless grammatical rules and vocabulary, even many of which are
unusable. The grammar and vocabulary taught in this approach seems to be too

5


academic for students. The students can understand and translate literacy texts but
they struggle to speak out, even a simple sentence. Their speaking and listening
knowledge are very limited, which is not suitable for the demand of communication
in real world.
In the middle of 20th century, following the Structur l Methods’ te ching
sequence, Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) approach was adopted and
implemented widely all over the world. Many Foreign Language Teaching (FLT)
books and syllabus based on this sequence and it is still appreciated today. In fact,
most teachers are familiar with PPP paradigm than any other methods. In Vietnam,


ppro ch helps to develop implicit gr mm r knowledge “by

providing frequent occurrence of

p rticul r form” (Hedge, 2000, p. 167) so th t

students notice it and practise to use it. Obviously, this approach is suitable to teach
grammar or specific structures, which is maybe the reason why teachers in Vietnam
still prefer this one in teaching grammar and language. It also attracts teachers
because it is easy for teacher to identify what to test and what to teach, which serves
best for their students in examination.
However, there occur many problems with this approach. At first, students
are probably happy and interested in being exposed to new language and practicing
that language. They can produce the language but usually trying to produce that
language makes them overuse the language, making it unnatural. Moreover, a time
later, it turns out that students do not remember properly or even forget the
language; thus, they are not able to produce the language properly, some even are
not able to produce at all. This approach also shows ineffectiveness in term of
communication because it focuses on structures and teaches discrete items so
students may use that item separately without connecting or combining with other
languages. People who criticize this approach put the emphasis on the focus on
lexicon and meaning instead of grammar and structure. The representatives of this
criticism can be listed as Communicative Language Teaching approach (Lewis),
Task Based Language Teaching (Willis and Willis), Lexical Approach.
In 70s and 80s, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emerged as a
response to shortcomings of previous approaches and the need for communication
of the globalized world. Its theory is that the primary function of language is
communic tion nd it ims t developing le rners’ communic tive competence.


years (Branden, 2006). Richards and Rodgers (2001, p.223) defined task-based
appro ch “ n ppro ch b sed on the use of t sks s the core unit of pl nning nd
instruction in l ngu ge te ching”. TBLT rose when criticism of CLT exploded nd

8


it was argued that both grammar and meaning should be taught at the same time
(Skehan, 2003). Though TBLT has shared some principles with CLT such as taking
more focus on meaning and preferring communicative activities, it goes beyond the
desire of meaning. It values the practical use of language that is language needs to
be transferrable to real-life activities.
The goals of TBLT is not much of which particular and specific words or
grammar items to teach or to learn, rather than in term of the purposes people learn
and use language. In other words, TBLT goal is to make learners complete or
perform a task by using language, helping them to develop their ability to take part
in different spontaneous and meaningful communication in real life. Thus, the
language teaching has to be organized around tasks to get those objectives and goals
done successfully (Skehan, 1998; Willis, and Willis, 2001). That is to say, in TBLT,
tasks are central to teaching. In TBLT, learners are expected to perform a task
without being explicitly taught grammatical structures. Long (1985), Prabhu (1987)
and Robinson (2001) all shared the idea that this approach creates more favorable
and better conditions for language development and language acquisition. TBLT
also get supports from many advocators, particularly Ellis (2003) with rationale
from psycholinguistic perspective and Skehan (1998, 2003) with the perspective
from cognitive approach.
In field of SLA, a common question to be concerned is that how language is
taught or organized to facilitate language learning and second language acquisition.
The previous approaches like Grammar-Translation, PPP are more of linguistic
approaches which take elements of linguistic system as a basis to teach separately in

focused on six principles and practices:
-

A need-based approach to content selection

-

An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target
language

-

The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation

-

The provision of opportunities for learners to focus not only on language but
also on the learning process itself
10


An enh ncement of le rner’s own person l experiences

-

s import nt

contributing elements to classroom learning
-



11


 An activity or action which is carried out as the result of processing or
understanding language, i.e. as a response. For example, drawing a map
while listening to a tape, listening to an instruction and performing a
command, may be referred to as tasks. Tasks may or may not involve the
production of language. A task usually requires the teacher to specify what
will be regarded as successful completion of the task. The use of a variety of
different kinds of tasks in language teaching is said to make teaching more
communic tive…since it provides a purpose for classroom activity which
goes beyond practice of language for its own sake.
(Richards, Platt&Weber, 1985)
 A piece of work or an activity, usually with a specified objective, undertaken
as part of an educational course, at work, or used to elicit data for research.
(Crookes, 1986)
 Any structured language learning endeavor which has a particular objective,
appropriate content, a specified working procedure, and a range of outcomes
for those who undert ke the t sk. “T sk” is therefore ssumed to refer to
range of workplans which have the overall purpose of facilitating language
learning from the simple and brief exercise type, to more complex and
lengthy activities such as group problem-solving or simulations and decisionmaking.
(Breen, 1987)
 An activity which required learners to arrive at an outcome from given
information through some process of thought and which allowed teachers to
control and regulate that process was regarded as a task.
(Prabhu, 1987)
 A task [is] any activity in which a person engages, given an appropriate
setting, in order to achieve a specifiable class of objective.

or appropriate prepositional content has been conveyed. To this end, it
requires them to give primary attention to meaning and to make use of their
own linguistic resources, although the design of the task may predispose

13


them to choose particular forms. A task is intended to result in language use
that bears a resemblance, direct or indirect, to the way language is used in the
real world. Like other language activities, a task can engage productive or
receptive, and oral or written skills, and also various cognitive processes.
(Ellis, 2003)
 A piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending,
manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their
attention is primarily focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in
order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning
rather than form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being
able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning,
a middle and an end
(Nunan, 2004)
Those definitions are interestingly similar but also interestingly different. For
some like Long, Crookes, Carroll, Bachman & Palmer and Bygate et al., tasks are
activities that are more of goal-directed but each contains distinctive emphases.
Long (1985) and Crookes (1986) emphasized the real-world relationship for an
ctivity to qu lify s

t sk. Long lso viewed “t sks” s things people do, not

necessarily related to language or language use. Bachman & Palmer (1996) and
Bygate et al. (2001) shared the idea of getting a specific purpose but clearly

Nunan (2004) defined pedagogical task the most profoundly and holistically.
He defined t sk “is

piece of cl ssroom work th t involves le rners in

comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while
their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to
express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to
manipulate form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to
stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and
n end”. The “t sk” in Nun n’s definition involves not only four skills but also
cognitive bility to process l ngu ge. The focus of “t sk” here is on me ning r ther
than form. However, it does not relieve the importance of grammatical knowledge
in expressing meaning, grammar is a basis that enables the language user to express
15