USING TASK-BASED APPROACH TO TEACH READING

COMPREHENSION

Ayaulym Kospanova Doskanatkyzy

ayaulym.kospanova@gmail.com

Master of Faculty of Education and Humanities Sciences

Suleyman Demirel University (SDU)

Abstract: Reading comprehension is one of the important aspects in teaching the

language, which includes not only written verbal communication, but also oral communication

skills. However, nowadays learning reading is considered as “uninteresting” activity by the

students. Thus, this article investigates the methods and techniques for teaching Reading to EFL

students as a way of improving the reading comprehension and communicative competence of

learners.

Keywords: Reading comprehension, communicative competence, task-based approach,

teaching reading, interactive teaching method.

1. Introduction

Recently, the status of English language in society has changed considerably. Globalization’s

rapid entry into the world community and the economic, sociocultural situation in the society

ensured a huge demand for knowledge of foreign languages and created a powerful motivational

base. Moreover, English language proficiency is no longer an opulence, but a necessity, which is

opening new opportunities in various spheres of life. In this regard, there is a clear interest in

new educational technologies, techniques, methods, and innovations that contribute to the

development of learners’s knowledge, competencies, and skills as speaking, reading, writing,

and listening. However, in Kazakhstani’s school and universities reading is a considered as a

skill which can be acquired during the learning process without using much effort and methods.
Thus, this following research will emphasize “teaching reading” and find effective methods to

teach reading skills and reading comprehension.

Reading is a complex activity that includes communicative, social activities of people and

provides a written form of verbal communication. Urquhart and Wei (1998) as cited in

Hedgcock&Ferris (2009) defined reading as “ the process of receiving and interpreting

information encoded in language form via the medium of print”. Moreover, Paran (2003)

characterized reading as a “communicative act”, explaining that after reading learners usually

discuss making a summary of the context to their partners, friends or teacher. To sum up, reading

itself includes not only written verbal communication but communicative activities through

receiving and interpreting the text. However, in the traditional classroom in a learning-teaching

framework reading is less communicative because it focuses on simple reading activities such as

“True or False”, defining the vocabulary and answering questions related to the given text. Such

classes and activities can be considered as teacher-centered because of the dominance of teachers

in the classroom (who speaks most of the time) and the passivity of students (who plays a role of

listener) (Hong-qin,2007). As a consequence, the learners are not able to develop reading

comprehension and have meaningful interaction with others to improve communicative

competence. Thus, the practical significance of this study lies in implementing a task-based

learning approach into the classroom to teach reading comprehension, whereas formulating

cognitive and social skills of learners.

2. Literature review

Researchers emphasize the importance of reading comprehension while teaching reading

abilities. For instance, Block, Gambrell, and Pressley (2002) as cited in Ness (2011) conclude

that reading comprehension is an important part of reading, noting that learners use

comprehension to construct meanings from the text. The “reading comprehension” defined is an

act, which involves retrieving information from a text, identifying themes, using higher order

thinking skills, comprehending text structure, and constructing pictures from a text (van den
Broek & Kremer, 2000). According to Nicaise and Gettinger (1995) reading comprehension is a

“cognitive act requiring both text-processing and comprehension-monitoring strategies”. It's also

worth mentioning the link between reading comprehension and oral language proficiency, for

instance if learner has a trouble with spoken language, comprehending the text becomes more

challenging, (Sesma et.al.,2009).As a result, teachers should consider teaching oral language in

correlation with reading activities, to help students succeed in acquiring spoken and written

language. As stated in Sukma (et.al., 2018) the usage of task-based approach may help learners

to develop reading skills and strategies, that play an important role for comprehending text and

prevent them from boredom. Task is in an activity that engages students, involves the use of

target language communicatively which reflects to real-world activity (Sukma, et.al.,2018).

Nunan (2006) as cited in Buyukkarci (2009) defines task as a classroom work, that engages

students in understanding, collaborating, creating in a target language, while learners focus on

creating meaningful interaction through activating grammatical knowledge. While implementing

task-based approach, it is also important to mention that task-based lesson includes three stages

as pre-task stage, on- task stage, post-task stage (Bygate,2015). At the pre-task stage teacher

prepares students to the performance and engages them with the topic of the task. At the on-task

stage learners focus on the task completion and learn how to interact with each other. And

finally, at the post-task stage learners report the outcome of the task. Therefore, teacher should

choose, adapt, formulate tasks correctly to correspond learner’s needs, language level and

interests (Hismanoglu & Hismanoglu, 2011), while following main stages of the task.

3. Methodology

3.2. Participants

For this study there have been selected six students of language education center with the

high pre-intermediate level proficiency. Participants included 4 female and 2 male students with

the age from 12 to 15. As ethnical consideration plays a huge role while conducting a research,

firstly students were provided with a consent and informed that participation will not be forced,
and were introduced to purpose, stages, methods and how the finding of the research will be

used.

3.3. Procedure

The main aim of this mixed method study was to investigate learners’ perception and

attitudes towards task-based activities in order to answer the following research questions as: 1.

“What are the participant’s perception to task-based approach for learning reading” and 2. “What

advantages and difficulties participants experienced?”. The study included 3 stages. At the first

stage of the study, in order to understand and compare reading activities, students were

introduced and competed exercises with traditional reading strategies as “predicting”, “scanning”

and “scamming”. Consequently, at the second stage, learners were introduced to task based

activities and jigsaw activity, that were integrated with pair-works, group works, and production

of final product. These tasks were selected as the reason of practicing vocabulary use and oral

speaking practices in a pair and group works, while formulating reading comprehension of the

learners. And finally, at the third stage learners were asked to participate in the survey and semi-

structured interview with researcher.

3.3. Instruments

For data collection there has been employed semi-structured interviews and survey. In order

to investigate learners’ perception there have been constructed survey questions with a 5-point

Likert scale; while for examining attitude towards TBLT there have asked seven interview

questions with participants. Each interview lasted from 15 to 20 minutes. Moreover, semi-

structured interview was offered in the language of choice for participants (English or Russian

languages). Then, some answers were translated and prescribed to the further analysis.

4. Results and Findings

Most compelling evidence from this study was drawn from the survey questions. Learners

were asked to evaluate their “reading skills” to draw general statistics. As it can be seen from the
table 1, none of the students evaluated their reading skills as “5” adding that: “Despite the fact I

understand the texts, I think my reading skills is not good enough”.

Table 1

From this results, it should be concluded that even if learners do not show any struggles with

completing reading exercises, there is a still need for emphasizing and devoting specific time to

teach “reading comprehension” in a meaningful manner, in that case learners will become more

confident about their reading abilities. Another key point from that was learned from the

interview part was learner’s attitude towards “traditional reading strategies”, which are

frequently used in the classrooms, as “traditional reading strategies” as “predicting, skinning,

scamming”. Surprisingly, all of the students claimed such activities “boring”, adding that

learning with these strategies “are not interesting, when there is a need to listen other student’s

predictions or to wait while others reading the texts”. Another student stated: “I like the new

methods more, because before we start the text, we do exercises to better understand and explore

into the topic. This helps us understand what we are going to read, as well as make skinning and

skamming faster and better.” Totally, all of the students preferred task-based activities than

traditional reading strategies, claiming that task activities are more engaging.

The findings of student attitudes were entirely favorable, as students believed that task-based

activities were beneficial, engaging, helpful and interesting.

 Table 2

From table 2 illustrated above, it can be seen that two of the participants completely enjoyed

performing the tasks while doing reading exercises, and only one student gave an average grade.

Their positive perception towards TBLT students explained with construction that tasks helped

them “to understand the essence of the text more, and develop not only reading skills, but also

speaking, writing and listening skills”. Moreover, tasks helped learners “to memorize words,

remember definitions”, hence students could find new words and more easily understand the

text. Additionally, two of the students completely agreed that task based activities helped them to

improve their reading skills, while only one student thought that task helped in an average

number; as well as number of students who agreed that tasks helped to enhance speaking skills

reached 3, and remaining student rated the effectiveness of task to improvement their speaking

abilities as medium.

The second research question analyses the experiences of the participants, particularly what

student liked the most and the least while completing activities. In the first place, it is important

to mention students’ viewpoint regarding the difficulties of the tasks. In the presented table 3

below, two of the students ranked difficulty of the task as “four” while four students ranked as

“three”, from this it may be concluded that the level of difficulty of the activities was a little high
for the participants, which could have an impact on the study's outcomes.

On the positive experiences from the TBLT, participants highlighted “group works” and

“pair works”, notably by the group activities they could “communicate and can improve their

speaking skills”. Comparatively, the interactiveness of task activities helped to engage

students, since even “passive learners became more active”, and learners involved directly in

the process rather than simply “reading the material”. Although, all of the students mentioned

“jigsaw activity”, adding that while doing group works “it was enjoyable to try explain the

text, use imagination for its explanation and collect from pieces of text whole story”. On the

contrary, students had some issues with the difficulties of the tasks. One student mentioned

that some words were unfamiliar, and he spend some time to find the definition and

translation of the word. Another student preferred collaborative projects to individual written

tasks, as it seemed to be more productive to interact with groupmates and practice speaking

skills. In the final analysis, learners asked to provide with new vocabulary in advance and add

more interactive exercises to the classes.

5. Discussion

Recently, there have been increased the usage of interactive activities. Especially, the

“amount of attention has been given to TBLT” increased rapidly (Kim & Jung, 2017). Several
studies were dedicated to explore effectiveness, challenges, advantages, or even teachers’ and

learners’ perception. For instance, the study which was conducted in the South Korea had similar

responses, as learners’ attitude was positive, while learners could notice effectiveness of TBLT

comparing traditional instructions (Kim & Jung, 2017). Another study which evaluated

students’ perception in Indonesia revealed positive attitudes of participants, whereas in students’

viewpoint task activities were engaging, dynamic, and they favored interaction and cooperation

elements of activities (Sholeh et.al., 2021). The study, which was conducted by Ismaili (2000)

also showed learner’s positive attitude towards task based a method, since task activities

established cooperative learning, encouraged and motivated students to take active participation

during the lessons. Generally, from the provided research findings, there can be seen the

similarity of the previous papers and this study. Perceptions and attitudes from learners’

perspective were equally positive. Moreover, it should be noted that there have been similar

challenges with Ahmed (2017) work which discovered limitations connected to “students’

proficiency in the English language”.

5.5. Limitation and suggestions for future research

This study showed various limitations, which may serve as useful guidance for future task-

based learning research. First limitation of the research was the number of participants. Despite

the fact that all replies were positive, the higher number of participants may have influenced the

results, and it is suggested to increase the number of participants in the future studies. The

second limitation of the study was related to tasks directly. The task difficulties should be also

simplified, as learners may encounter some difficulties when completing activities, which also

affects the results of the study; and it is recommended to thoroughly construct the tasks in

proportion to the language level of the students.

6. Conclusion
 This study, which was aimed to examine students’ perceptions towards task-based activities

received positive responses from the learners. For the first research question regarding to the

learner’s attitude, it can be seen participants enjoyed performing tasks comparing to commonly

used reading strategies, besides learners believed that tasks helped them improve their speaking

and reading abilities meanwhile establishing meaningful interactions with the groupmates

contributed to communicate in English and practice oral speech. Furthermore, students

acknowledged the advantages of task activities, such as vocabulary practice, collaboration

works, and reading exercises; as well as difficulties of the task, individual works, and completing

written assignments were considered as drawbacks. Although, the study revealed two main

limitations as participant number and complexity of the tasks. Despite some drawbacks and

limitations, the implementation of the task-based activities in relation to teaching reading was

successful; and researcher hopes that these findings will help teachers to implement task-based

activities into the classroom while taking into consideration suggestions and recommendations of

the study.
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