Teachers’ Attitudes and Understanding of Task-Based Language Teaching - A Study Conducted at the Faculty of Languages, Cultures and Communications at SEEU

The aim of the paper was to investigate teachers’ attitudes and understanding of Task-based language teaching (TBLT) at the Faculty of Languages, Cultues and Communications. In addition to this, the study aimed to identify positive effects that TBLT have in the classroom and also the reasons why teachers decide to implement this approach in their instruction. As a subcategory of communicative language teaching TBLT became a very important are of research since the last decade, 20th century and it is used in all levels of education. Neverthless, the reasearch in Macedonia in this field is very poor due to previous education where teachers used old teaching methodologies.

In this paper we attempt to identify some main issues related to teachers’ attitudes and understading of TBLT and also the implementation of some principles of TBLT. The study participants are twenty teachers who teach languages at SEEU and have different teaching experiences. The main instrument used was the questionnaire which was partly adapted and modified from Nunan's (2004), a checklist for evaluating communicative tasks, and a teacher interview.

The results obtained from the study instruments showed that participants have a high level of understanding of TBLT principles and they expressed positive views towards its' implementation in the classroom. Finally, the implications of the study may affect teacher practice and also curriculum design at SEEU.