ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on managing effective and stimulating task-based lessons for students of all levels. It presents a rationale for making occasional use of a task-based approach, and then follows with a few examples of effective lessons. The chapter shows how effective teachers recognise the value of using language for a practical purpose, the importance of the communicative principle known as the information gap, and the need to allow students an opportunity to use the language independently. It emphasises how important it is to provide stimulating, cognitively challenging comprehensible input to allow the natural processes of language acquisition to occur. Although project and task-based approaches may be motivating for students because of their content, it is hard to make them fit within a structured curriculum based on progressing from easy to harder language. It is sensible to make occasional use of tasks or bigger projects to supplement the teacher's normal scheme of work or curriculum plan.
