Abstract
This paper presents a case study of a Black Spanish-language teacher and her 4th-grade students using Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) six years after a teacher-training program. We describe the program and the teacher’s understanding of tasks and TBLT. Using a bottom-up approach, we then explore the teacher and students’ implementation of TBLT six years later in a socioeconomically resilient 4th-grade classroom in Miami, Florida, where 95 % of the students are Black. Task-as-process was assessed with classroom observations, handouts, task outcomes, and interviews. Findings revealed that the teacher continued using TBLT, highlighting both its opportunities and challenges. Opportunities were driven by her beliefs, reliance on “Black students’ linguistic gifts,” and access to sample tasks. Challenges included time constraints, COVID-related logistics, and professional loneliness. Her innovative TBLT implementation was influenced by shared cultural artifacts considered “fun” to incorporate. Using Love’s framework of abolitionist teaching, we explore how the teacher and students resisted ideologies of culturelessness through Black cultural unity. Six years post-training, the teacher’s use of tasks and students’ success in TBLT were mediated by their shared Blackness. We conclude by arguing for more world language studies focusing on Black teachers and young learners as innovators in TBLT.
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Research ethics: Not applicable.
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Author contributions: Tasha Austin and Aris Clemons and Melissa Baralt contributed equally to this work. The authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: The authors state no conflict of interest.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Data availability: Not applicable.
References
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
- Research Articles
- Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
- Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
- Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
- Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
- Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
- Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
- Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
- “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
- Regular Articles
- Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
- A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
- Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
- Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
- Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
- General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
- Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
- Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
- Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
- The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
- An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
- “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
- Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
- Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
- A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
- Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
- The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
- Research Articles
- Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
- Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
- Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
- Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
- Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
- Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
- Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
- “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
- Regular Articles
- Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
- A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
- Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
- Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
- Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
- General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
- Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
- Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
- Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
- The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
- An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
- “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
- Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
- Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
- A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
- Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
- The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)