The Use of Real Life Tasks to Enrich an EFL Course for Business Students

Abstract

The purpose of research is to determine the impact on learning of using an authentic task to make teaching English more meaningful in an EFL class. Participants were twenty students from pre-intermediate level course from the Business School of Guayaquil University. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed to report the level of business email responses and to explain the reasons for its development. The intervention consisted of eight weeks of authentic task application in order to improve their ability in responding business email in the following areas: quality of response to customer, language usage and email form. Overall results indicated that students performance on responding business email increased a little after the use authentic task. By the end of the intervention almost all of the students reached expected level for the language subcategory. Discussion section presents the factors that might contribute to and impede the accomplishment of the objectives.