Using Tasks in Second Language Teaching: Practice in Diverse Contexts (Second Language Acquisition, 143)

by Craig Lambert (Editor), Rhonda Oliver (Editor)

This book examines the use of tasks in second language instruction in a variety of international contexts, and addresses the need for a better understanding of how tasks are used in teaching and program-level decision-making. The chapters consider the key issues, examples, benefits and challenges that teachers, program designers and researchers face in using tasks in a diverse range of contexts around the world, and aim to understand practitioners’ concerns with the relationship between tasks and performance. They provide examples of how tasks are used with learners of different ages and different proficiency levels, in both face-to-face and online contexts. In documenting these uses of tasks, the authors of the various chapters illuminate cultural, educational and institutional factors that can make the effective use of tasks more or less difficult in their particular context.

368 pages, Hardcover

Published July 15, 2020

About the author

Craig Lambert, Ph.D. is the author of Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day (Counterpoint Press, 2015). He was a staff writer and editor at Harvard Magazine for more than two decades. Lambert’s work has appeared in publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to Town & Country to The New England Journal of Medicine. He is also the author of Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). He graduated from Harvard College and received his doctorate, also from Harvard, in sociology.