Examining the Effects of Task-Based Language Teaching in Japanese EFL University Classes

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In the first year of our project, we managed to accomplish the majority of our goals and appear to be on the schedule we put forth in our proposal. To review, in the first year of our project, we managed to conduct a pilot study to help us move forward. In this project, we wanted to explore our data collection and data analysis techniques. Since the analysis to analyze speaking output that we are planning to use in our research project is quite complex, a pilot study was useful to fine-tune some of the methods we are planning to implement in the main study. In this pilot study, each of the eight participants was given an assessment at two points in time: within five days of treatment beginning (Pre-test), approximately twelve weeks later, i.e., within five days of treatment ending (Post-test). Each of these assessments involved participating in a dyadic conversation with a classmate, completing two questionnaires (designed to assess willingness to communicate in English and learner autonomy), and being interviewed. The treatment involved having students transcribe the video-recorded conversations they were in. After the pre-test, the instructor will take the students through a series of steps that teaches them how to methodically analyze the video and speech transcripts in terms of fluency (temporal and hesitation), syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and accuracy. Upon breaking down their performances with the instructor, participants were able to clearly identify their strengths and weaknesses and, ultimately, create well-defined goals for themselves moving forward.