ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

186Isabel FernándezTaking into account this definition, the Task-based approach will bedesigned so the students can express themselves using these four skills. In order toget it, every class will be designed with a very concrete objective. To achieve it,some grammar rules will be taught every day, next to the rules for the purpose ofproducing appropiate utterances, and some strategies to infer the meaning. This isan essential point when we want to teach a foreign language; to motivate thestudent to be able to understand the general meaning of the messages even if hedoes not decode every word he is listening to, or he is reading. For this, there arequite a lot of exercises to work with key words, very quick exercises where thestudent has to listen to sentences, uttered by a range of native speakers –withdifferent accents- in which the listener must only stand out the indispensablewords to undertand the message. Furthermore, there are also exercises withquestions, and after listening some conversations, the student must answer specificdetails of the conversation, promoting in this way the “selective listening”.From my point of view the Task-based approach is really useful,especialy to teach a second language quickly, but not for a universitarianteaching profile. To carry out this enterprise, the tasks must be programmed inprogression. First of all some introductions, filling in some documents, doingshopping, looking for a job, social relationships, etc. Taking as a example“introductions”, we could start seing the different ways of introducing yourselfin the target language “me llamo…” “te presento a…” “encantado/a”, “qué talestás/está?”, etc. After showing these structures, we could work deepler in theroom, with different sociologic contexts, to analyse how we should address thesesentences to different recipients:A) the bakerB) working matesC) the father of our future wifeD) our bossTo make the exercise, we may do some role games, in which everystudent must play the role of a different character, and develop the dialogue untilhe is achiving the objectives of “knowing the recipient, introducing himself,being polite”. The student will make use of his knowledge on the culture of thetarget language, and he will have to guess how to behave in those contexts, infront of those recipients, in the proper way. The professor will be there to correctsome inaccurate expressions, but only as a coordinator and helper.Once the objective is achieved, the group will carry on with another task. Everytask has got a close structure, in the sense that if one of the students misses a class,it does not interrupt the pace of the group. Even if there are students from differentlevels, they will be able to work altogether – this is an important issue, since that isthe main problem when a teacher has to teach in the context of students whocannot attend the classes every day, or every student comes from a differentcultural and educated background. Similarly to the real world, people are different,and we live together, learning from other people’s experiences in our daily life, inthe class it can be very useful to work with students from different levels. But the