Chapter 12. Task-based language teacher education in an undergraduate program in Japan

Task-based language teacher education can assist participants in adopting (a) roles and responsibilities based on their needs, (b) collaborative approaches to professional development, and (c) communicative language teaching practices. The classroom study presented in this chapter examines aspects of novice teacher cognition among 15 participants in a one-semester, task-based, undergraduate seminar on language teaching methods. A mixed-methods investigation included retrospective comments, classroom discourse, and survey results as data on the effectiveness of the task-based teacher education approach. Findings of the study indicated that seminar participants both gained and shared knowledge related to teaching practice through classroom tasks. In addition, participants and their peers rated various recommended instructional practices from the task-based language teaching (TBLT) literature highly. The chapter discusses the potential of task-based teacher training to support curricular innovation initiatives like TBLT designed to enhance language education in the Japanese EFL setting.