todoELE

taskGen is an ongoing three-year research project made possible by a grant PID2020-119009RB-I00 funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN) and National Research Agency (AEI) 10.13039/501100011033. The project will end in September 2024.

The Context
The last four decades have seen an exponential growth of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) as pedagogical and research perspective which has promoted the use of tasks by teachers and researchers across teaching contexts and across languages.

The Problem
Despite the undeniable attention it has attracted, some scholars have pointed to the lack of a reciprocal transfer between researchers and teachers. While there is an unquestionable interest in using tasks and task-based syllabi by educational authorities, researchers, and teachers, there are three significant and identifiable gaps in the use of tasks as vehicles for language teaching and language learning:

1. The need to support teachers and material designers who have not been sufficiently trained to design tasks, who are often left to their own resources, and who typically have limited time to create materials
2. As claimed by numerous researchers, the need to bridge the gap between research findings and classroom practices, by ensuring that research findings reach practitioners and that task-based instructional practices are fed back to researchers in order to improve task design (see Long, 2015 for an in-depth discussion)
3. The need to advance the task-based research agenda by investigating how teachers engage in actual task design, by looking at their choices and overall task designs, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

In terms of ‘design thinking’, our higher calling is making teachers’ and learners’ lives easier and better by facilitating the design of tasks for the teaching and learning of a second or foreign language. This project is about enabling and empowering teachers, and it entails principled design and considerable flexibility.

The Goal
The main goal of the project is to generate a web-based tool for task design that will follow the principles of task-based learning models and frameworks. This will be a semi-automated, flexible, and adaptive tool that will aid task designers in creating tasks for L2 learning and provide the rationale behind design decisions.