On the Impact of Task Based and Task Supported Language Teaching on Iranian Efl Learners' Reading Comprehension

1.IntroductionIn many second or foreign language teaching situations, reading receives a special focus. It is the most important skill. It is highly valued by EFL students as well as teachers. Richards and Renandya (2002) claimed that reading receives special focus in foreign language teaching. There are two reasons for considering reading as the most important skill in language learning: First, reading comprehension is one of the most important goals in most foreign language settings. Second, reading texts helps learners to accomplish various pedagogical purposes.One of the main aims of language teaching and language learning programs in secondary and tertiary levels of education is reading (Birjandi Noroozi, 2008) Reading as a form of language input has been considered as one of the most important skills in the area of language learning and teaching (Negari Rouhi, 2012) Chastian (1988, p. 218) claimed that "all reading activities serve to facilitate communication fluency in each of the other language skills".Task based teaching is not just about getting learners to do one task and then another task and another one. If that was the case, intermediate and advanced students would become resourceful and gain fluency at the expense of accuracy, and beginners would probably fail to build the basic structures that are essential during the whole process of acquisition and construction of a new language.The use of tasks in second language acquisition (SLA) has been closely linked to developments in the study of second language acquisition. In this regards, Ellis (2003) says: In the early years of SLA (the late sixties and seventies) many scholars and researchers were primarily dealt with describing how learners acquired an L2, documenting the order and sequence in which the grammar of language was acquired, and the types of oral interactions in which child and adult language learners participated. Over the years, second language acquisition has become more theory oriented with researchers seeking to test specific hypotheses based on theories of L2 acquisition. Tasks paly a vital role in both the early descriptive research and the later more theoretically based research. Also, tasks have become a focus of research in their own right.Like researchers, language teachers, material writers, and course designers have not been slow to recognize the value of tasks. Many various methodologists and scholars have simply incorporated tasks into traditional language based approaches to teaching. Others, more radically, have treated tasks as units of teaching in their own right and have designed whole courses around them. These two ways of using tasks can be referred to respectively as task supported language teaching and as task based language teaching. In both cases, tasks have been employed to make language teaching more communicative. Tasks, therefore, are an important feature of communicative language teaching (CLT).Task based teaching refers to a teaching approach based only on meaning focused tasks. Whereas, in the case of tasks as support "tasks are seen not as a means by which learners acquire new knowledge or restructure their inter language but simply as a means by which learners can activate their existing knowledge of the L2 by developing fluency" (Ellis, 2003, p. 30) Therefore, in task supported language teaching, tasks are supplementary.Task based language teaching is essentially a way to arrange a communicative language teaching (CLT) According to Larseen Freeman and Anderson (2012) one of the main objectives of a teacher who uses TBLT is to make facilitation learning through stimulating and storytelling the students in a variety of tasks which have a velar outcome.2.Purpose of the StudyIn general, this study aimed to compare the effect of task based and task supported language teaching on Iranian pre intermediate EFL learners' reading comprehension.