Undergraduates’ perception on learning English as a second language through Task-Based Language Teaching: with special focus on the University of Ruhuna.

Abstract

The challenge of making Sri Lankan undergraduates communicatively competent in English has been a concern over the decades. This paper attempts to discuss the undergraduates' perception of being exposed to learning English within the TBLT framework. When a graduate passes out from a university in Sri Lanka, he or she has learned English as a second language in both the school system and the university system for more than one and a half decades. Nevertheless, a general complaint often made regarding these graduates is their poor language competence. TBLT is very popular in various contexts of the world and it has now become a theoretically well-established concept. Thus, the researcher carried out an empirical investigation at the Faculty of Science of the University of Ruhuna, taking 60 first year undergraduates as the sample. The students were randomly divided into two groups, namely the Experimental Group that received instruction in TBLT approach and the Control Group that received instruction in Presentation, Practiceand Production (PPP) approach. Each group was exposed to 30 hours of instruction and the study was carried out over a period of 15 weeks. Hence, this papers discusses the perception of the subjects of the EG towards learning within the TBLT framework. The perception of the undergraduates shows that they found the experience to be very effective and productive in learning English at university. The data obtained through a five point Likert scale and a semi- structured interview was both quantitatively and qualitatively analysed.