This year’s Dalhousie Conference on University Teaching and Learning features a pre-conference workshop on May 5 focused on language education, entitled: “Building Inclusive Language Classrooms: Cooperative Learning, Task-Based Pedagogy, and AI in Multilingual Higher Education“.

I will be delivering the opening keynote at this workshop, entitled The Challenges and Opportunities of Task-Based Language Teaching in Multicultural Classrooms

Here’s the abstract:

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is one of the dominant paradigms in language instruction in Canada and other places, as it can lead to increased classroom engagement and motivation, and the development of communicative competence and learner autonomy. However, in some language-learning contexts worldwide, well-established, local approaches to language instruction are favoured over TBLT. In the highly diverse setting of the Canadian university language classroom we welcome learners from a variety of educational cultures and contexts with varying levels of familiarity with task-based learning. This can lead to unequal achievement of the objectives and outcomes associated with TBLT.

In this interactive session, we will learn about the fundamentals of TBLT, explore case studies of the friction that can exist between TBLT and other common approaches to language instruction, and develop strategies that Dalhousie language instructors can use when integrating TBLT into their teaching of students from diverse backgrounds.

I’ll share the slides here soon!

In this talk I’ll draw not only on my many years of teaching university students from diverse educational backgrounds in Canada, but also on my time teaching at Shandong University of Finance and Economics in China and the work I did with some colleagues there on TBLT.