1. 1. Introduction

1.1Theoretical Background

The quest for ways of recognizing why some English learners are more successful than others especially in speaking ability turned towards individual differences. Since communication in the world today enjoys utmost importance, EFL learners are looking for ways to help them improve their speaking ability. In Iran, although English language learners receive English instruction in secondary high schools and universities, the instruction is often inadequate for

 students to develop their speaking as an essential component in learning a language. So they tend towards English classes which are supposed to be more communicative, as, for example, they expect to receive instruction based on new methods (i.e. communication methods).

The term Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) covers a variety of approaches that all focus on helping learners to communicate meaningfully in a target language. Moreover, “CLT is perhaps the method or approach that most contemporary teachers would subscribe to, despite the fact that it is widely misunderstood and misapplied. This method is based on the beliefs that learners will learn best if they participate in meaningful communication” (Scrivener 2010, p.32).

Actually, we may make distinction between a stronger and weaker version of CLT. In strong CLT, students’ learning is more communicative, that is, doing

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 communication tasks with a limited role for explicit teaching and traditional practice exercises. On the other hand, in weak version of CLT students’ learning is done through a wide variety of teaching, exercises, activities and study, with more attention towards speaking and listening work (Scrivener, 2010).

Of course , it should be reiterated that communicative language teaching may be realized by different frameworks or methods such as Task- based Language Teaching (TBLT).

1.1.2Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT)

TBLT is ” a variant of CLT which bases work cycles around the preparation for, doing of, and reflective analysis of tasks that reflect real-life needs and skills”  (Scrivener, 2010, p.32).  Moreover, TBLT is” an approach to the design of language courses in which the point of departure is not an ordered list of linguistic items, but a collection of tasks” ( Nunan 1989, p.24). In his 1989 book on task-based language teaching,

He drew a distinction between pedagogical tasks and real- world or target   tasks , they are the sorts of things that individuals typically do outside the classroom so the ultimate rational for language instruction is to enable learners to do these things using language , and it is to be expected that classroom time will be taken up with rehearsal of making reservation, writing letters, finding destination in a dictionary and so on; however learners will also do many things in class that are not rehearsal for performance outside of the classroom (Nunan,1989, p.25).

Furthermore, Nunan (1989) sequenced tasks as follows:

Tasks from reception to production.In other words listening and reading tasks generally come before writing and speaking tasks. A reproductive task is one in which the student reproduces language provided by the teacher, the textbook, or the tape. In contrast to reproductive tasks, creative tasks are those that require learners to come up with language for which they have not been specifically cued. In other words, they are asked to put together familiar elements in new or novel combinations, therefore; in designing sequence of tasks, it is important to consider the salience for learners of the pedagogical goals of the tasks the extent to which learning strategies are made explicit, the extent to which the task incorporates an experiential philosophy of learning by doing, and the opportunities provided to learners for inductive learning (p.30).