TBLT Perspectives on Teaching from an EFL Textbook at a Vietnam University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated the relationship between the affordances for task-based teaching in a textbook and teachers’ awareness of and uptake of these affordances. Specifically, it compared and evaluated the communicativeness and task-likeness of activities in the textbook, New Cutting Edge, Elementary (Cunningham & Moore, 2005) and then contrasted these findings with classroom observation data on the way the activities were implemented by three Vietnamese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers at a Vietnamese university. Interviews with the teachers provided further data on their implementation decisions. The analysis and evaluation of the textbook activities and how they were implemented adopted two coding frameworks, one for evaluating communicativeness (Littlewood, 2004) and the other for evaluating task-likeness (Ellis, 2018). The analysis of communicativeness revealed that while the textbook has a high proportion of activities with low communicative value, the task analysis showed that many of these activities are, in fact, either tasks or task-like. However, form-focused activities typically precede the tasks, which compromises the alignment of the textbook with TBLT. Data from classroom observations of three 90-minute lessons taught by each teacher showed that the teachers consistently reduced the communicativeness and task-likeness of the textbook activities, and replaced them with teacher-centered, explicit grammar explanation and drill practice. Stimulated recall interviews and follow-up semi-structured interviews revealed the teachers’ rationales for their practice, including their concern about the unsuitability of tasks for low proficiency students, exam pressure and time constraints, and their lack of awareness of the nature of language learning tasks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".