When I first started studying Japanese, in Japanese, I was mighty confused.

Nothing was familiar – the scripts, the sounds the grammar were all totally alien to my Western mind, so i got a good introduction to how Japanese beginners feel
when they encounter English.

I was taught in a very traditional Japanese way – listen, learn, repeat. Although it seems to have worked It was pretty tough and I’m sure that there are
additional methods to use that can help learning.

The problem I’m faced with teaching first year beginners at Junior High School, around 11 or 12 years old, are manifold:

 Motivation
 Interest
 Ability
 School Mindset or Environment
 Class Control
 Fear

For many this is the first time to encounter English formally and with a native speaking, foreign, teacher. Others have been learning for years at cram schools or
private language schools so have more familiarity with English. When shoved together in a new school with new friends and faced with a foreign face some kids
can be overwhelmed and lose not only interest in English, but also in education altogether.

Using the TBLT ethos for beginners is slightly more difficult than for learners who already have some L2. However tasks that can integrate the goals of TBLT can
be produced and successfully  delivered that solve some of the problems mentioned above.

The first step to cultivating helpful attitudes within these beginners is to focus on them and introduce tasks that can accommodate the lowest but also stretch the
highest.

Taking a student centered approach offers the chance for students to relate to familiar situations in their everyday life and experience and begin to see how these
can be expressed in L2. This is not only inherently interesting for them (its all about “me”) but also a social experience as students’ experiences are compared
and contrasted by peers.

My goals for beginners are to develop topic focused vocabulary and grammar knowledge around students’ experience. To this end I developed some lesson
materials that develop all of the language skills in different stages and different levels of intensity. You can download the free Tasked Based Lessons here.)
What is happening to the English language. NBC Nightly News recently aired a criticism of English speakers, accusing us of misusing the grammar of the language. This is a criticism we
have heard from editors, publishers, and readers for at least 300 years. But is it fair? Are we battering English grammar or is English grammar simply changing, as all languages do, over
time? Linguists have been struggling with this question for ages.
Take, for example, the plural number in English. English traditionally distinguishes one or more objects by a distinct form, the plural, e.g. one table, two tables, many tables. Lately,
however, a series of problems has arisen in the language that suggests this distinction is in trouble.
For example, have you heard people say things like this:
A large amount of pigeons flew by
We found less pigeons than we expected
English once distinguished nouns referring to substances that are always in the singular by using amount for singular substances and number for countable objects in the plural:
A large amount of Kool-Aid, ambition, coffee, or crawfish gumbo
A large number of pigeons, bullwhips, armadillos, or blueberry pies
The same distinction was made by less and fewer. Less was used only if the noun were uncountable: less Kool-Aid, less coffee, fewer crawfish but less crawfish gumbo.Fewer was applied
to countable objects: fewer bullwhips, fewer armadillos, and fewer blueberry pies. This distinction, too, seems to be swooshing out the window these days. Is that a natural or unnatural
process?
One final bit of evidence. Kay Bock, one of the nation's leading psycholinguists, has been researching the plurals of nouns and finding that we are confusing singular and plural more and
more.
In English, the noun that is the subject of a sentence agrees with its verb. Roughly, if the noun has an the plural -s on it, the verb doesn't (The pigs run) but if the noun doesn't have one (is
singular), the verb does (The pig runs).
What Professor Bock is finding is that agreement is not always between the subject noun and the verb, as grammar dictates, but between the noun nearest the verb, whatever its function in
the sentence. For example:
A rootery of pigs were running through the barnyard.
As the problem of rooting pigs grow, we have to address them.
In these sentences, the subject nouns are group and problem, so the verb should contain the -s:
A rootery of pigs was running through the barnyard.
As the problem of rooting pigs grows, we have to address it.
What Bock is finding, is that agreement is often between the verb and the nearest noun to it, which is not necessarily the subject of the sentence. She thinks language is changing but such
sentences sound a lot like bad grammar.
By the way, this has nothing to do with the difference between British and US English, where the British use the plural with what linguists call 'collective nouns' (as opposed to our use of
rootery above): nouns that are singular in form but refer to a plurality of objects:
The Parliament are in session
The crew are on alert
The team play well together.
The British are consistent in this usage. In the US it seems that our grasp of the sense of plurality is diminishing and, if that is the case, we could see the plural disappear from the language
in a relative short linguistic period—perhaps, fewer than 200 years!
Before summing up, let me alert you of one final symptom that seems to fit the pattern of the other three. To understand it, you have to be aware of another loss in English: the number of
suffixes for marking grammatical functions like number, person, tense, are disappearing faster than frogs. Suffixes like -dom, -ery, -ess and many others are no longer being added to new
words.
The result of this is that the suffixes we are left with have to serve more and more functions. For example, the suffix -s is used to mark the following:
The plural: ant-s, launching-s, door-s
The 3rd singular Present tense of verbs: He/she/it run-s, smell-s, plunge-s
Making nouns out of adjectives: linguistic-s, acrobatic-s, mathematic-s
Possessive: George's, Bush's, the anaconda's (ignore the apostrophe since you can't hear it)
This brings us to the fourth bit of evidence that at least US English-speakers are losing their grasp of the plural: plural number is often confused with nonplural uses. You have probably
heard things like these:
Boscov's are having a big sale this week.
Logistics are not my forte.
These would be just speech errors if they didn't fit the pattern created by the first three bits of evidence: we are losing our grip on the plural of words.
So, how will we be able to communicate if the plural disappears? Would you believe that many languages get away without the singular-plural distinction today and have been doing so for
millennia?
Oriental languages like Vietnamese and Chinese have no singular-plural distinction at all. The reason these languages do without plural number suggests that it might be redundant in
English: we generally use the plural with some modifier that makes plural obvious:

Many Many
Cadillacs Cadillac
Five toads Five toad
A few warts A few wart
Do we really need -s when we already have many, five, few in the sentence? The Chinese and Vietnamese have built advanced civilizations on languages limited to phrases like those in the
second column above. English could be getting more like Chinese!
If the plural is abandoning English, it is too early to be sure. However, if the process has begun, there is no stopping it, so tormenting your kids with constant grammatical corrections will
not work. Only time will tell and, as we all know, time takes its time.

—Dr. Goodword is Robert Beard, PhD Linguistics, and President, The Lexiteria

 There are numerous theories and approaches to teaching a second language, some exotic some mundane but all have one thing in common – a desire to make
the acquisition of a foreign or second language as efficient and effective as possible.

Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is an approach which offers students material which they have to actively engage in the processing of in order to achieve a
goal or complete a task. Much like regular tasks that we perform everyday such as making the tea, writing an essay, talking to someone on the phone, TBLT
seeks to develop students’ interlanguage through providing a task and then using language to solve it.

Here are some of the main features of TBLT:

 meaning is primary
 there is some communication problem to solve
 there is some sort of relationship to comparable real world activities
 task completion has some priority
 the assessment is done in terms of outcomes

On the other hand, tasks:

 do not give learners other people’s meanings to regurgitate

 are not concerned with language display
 are not conformity oriented
 are not practice oriented
 do not embed language in materials so that specific structures can be focused on

Which leads to some examples of tasks:

 completing one another’s family tree

 agreeing on advice to give the writer of a letter to an agony aunt
 solving a riddle
 leaving a message on someone’s answering machine

but which rule out:

 completing a transformation exercise

 most Q and A with a teacher
 inductive learning activities where preselected material is conducive to the
 generation of language rules

(From Skehan, 1998 A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning).

From this we can see that tasks focus on form (rather than individual forms of many separate structures) and that learners have to actively negotiate meaning
and produce communication to complete the task.

Skehan’s list offers some exciting and fun possibilities. When I introduce tasks such as solving a crossword and then getting the students to make their own and
then share it with each other, or read about a topic and watch a related video clip, students become engaged with language and meaning as well as intensive
cognitive processing which, I believe, induces interlanguage modification and development.

While students in my context in Japan are somewhat hesitant to engage or develop conversation skills in a school classroom, they are more than happy to take
their knowledge and apply it to various tasks. However, even when they are required to speak given a task based approach they generally are eager to try and
complete the task and perform it in front of others!

In short, TBLT is an approach which seeks to allow students to work somewhat at their own pace and within their own level and area of interest to process and
restructure their interlanguage. It moves away from a prescribed developmental sequence and introduces learner freedom and autonomy into the learning
process. The teacher’s role is also modified to that of helper.
 Introduction
Communicative competence is a concept introduced by Dell Hymes and discussed
and redefined by many authors. Hymes' original idea was that speakers of a language
  have to have more than grammatical competence in order to be able communicate
effectively in a language; they also need to know how language is used by members
of a speech community to accomplish their purposes.
The modules in this section identify eight aspects of communicative competence.
 
They are grouped together in two groups of four:
Linguistic aspects

 Phonology and orthography

   Grammar
 Vocabulary
 Discourse (textual)

Pragmatic aspects

 Functions
   Variations
 Interactional skills
 Cultural framework

Introduction
These guidelines have been created to help you design and plan your own language
 
and culture learning program. They are organized according to three parameters:
 The stage of learning
 The basic language skill being developed
 
 The aspect of communicative competence in focus

  Each guideline has the following parts:

 a list of objectives considered appropriate for learners of that stage in relation
to the aspect of communicative competence in focus
 a list of strategies the learner can use to achieve these objectives
 
 a list of language learning techniques to implement the strategies
 a list of language learning activities to implement the strategies

Language Awareness can be defined as explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language
teaching and language use.

It covers a wide spectrum of fields. For example, Language Awareness issues include exploring the benefits that can be derived from developing a good
knowledge about language, a conscious understanding of how languages work, of how people learn them and use them.

Can we become better language users or learners or teachers if we develop a better understanding? And can we gain other advantages: e.g. in our relations with
other people and/or cultures, and in our ability to see through language that manipulates or discriminates? Language Awareness interests also include learning
more about what sorts of ideas about language people normally operate with, and what effects these have on how they conduct their everyday affairs: e.g. their
professional dealings.