Fostering the pragmatic competence by recording videos based on the task based language teaching approach

Abstract

The Colombian Ministry of Education has recently implemented the program “Colombia very well 2015-2025” in order to strengthen the language competencies of English learners in the country starting in the schools. To this aim, the Colombian government has found in the Tourism industry a new strategy to improve the English level of the citizens. Although this program has brought new opportunities to young learners, most students of public schools in Bogotá are not able to take advantage of it yet, because they are not prepared enough to reach the highest levels of proficiency (B2,C1 and C2) proposed by the CEFR. Therefore, the aim of this research project is to analyze the influence of video- creation tasks to promote the development of the pragmatic competence on A1 tenth graders in two public institutions of Bogotá. The research followed a participatory action research and the data was analysed following a systematic design through open, axial, and selective coding proposed in grounded theory. The results revealed that by implementing the TBLT approach, the students ‘pragmatic competence was enhanced by providing them with an innovative way to relate the language that they are learning with their own contexts through video recordings. We found that through Ecotourism the students felt motivated to learn English in a meaningful way. They proved that by sharing information of different places of the city in English, they could contribute to promote the city in a positive way. Furthermore, students were able to change their perception about the importance of learning English in a non-bilingual nation, taking their own culture as the starting point to share their vision of the world with others around the world. ​​