Task Appraisal: A Comparative Study of Novice and Experienced EFL Teachers’ Attitudes

Task-based language teaching as a communicative approach to language instruction has attracted the attention of lots of theorizers and practitioners of language teaching these days. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study is to determine how novice and experienced teachers take different classification of tasks into account. Specifically, as two distinct groups, the participants who are 70 in the novice, and 50 in the experienced group, were provided with a questionnaire containing the task typology proposed by Nunan (2004). His classification includes: Cognitive, Interpersonal, Linguistic, Affective, and Creative tasks. Then, based on a Likert scale of 1 to 5, the participants were supposed to make a decision about the relative value of those tasks from Not valuable to Very valuable . Following that, the teachers were interviewd to get enoughinformation. The study benefited from mixed method research principles. The data were fed into SPSS in order to spot any possibly significant difference between the two groups. To this end, both independent samples t-tests were run and E-mail interview was conducted for experienced and novice teachers. There were some differences between novice and experienced teachers regarding the sub-elements of tasks. The results can be attributed to the background of experienced teachers as far as they can recognize that by making frequent use of tasks they can involve their students in the process of experiential learning affecting both the efficiency and effectiveness of their teaching and their learners’ learning. The email interview almost,not exactly, supports the same result as the quantitative one did

کلیدواژه ها:

Experienced teachers ، Novice teachers ، Task ، Task-based language teaching