Mentoring task-based language teaching as an innovation in an Indonesian secondary school

Abstract This article seeks to address a lack of research documenting how mentoring can help teachers to introduce TBLT in an Asian context. We report a whole semester project in an Indonesian secondary school where a mentor (an experienced teacher-educator) worked with a teacher, who was used to a structural approach, to introduce task-based language teaching (TBLT) into his classroom. We describe how the mentoring was set up and carried out to pre-empt problems that evaluation studies have shown can arise with TBLT. To evaluate to what extent the mentoring was successful, we conducted a case study employing qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, examining the extent to which the mentoring enabled the teacher to implement TBLT and whether the TBLT resulted in greater learning than in a traditional, structural-oriented classroom. The main findings were that the teacher was successful in transitioning to TBLT as evidenced in his ability to design his own tasks and by the kinds of questions he asked, the strategic use of the learners’ L1 and focus-on-form during the performance of the tasks (i.e., the kinds of interactional features fundamental to TBLT). Another finding was that the learners in the TBLT class also demonstrated greater language development than a comparable structural-oriented class. We utilize the evidence collected from the teacher’s implementation of TBLT to discuss the mentoring that took place and to identify ways of improving it.