Efforts to introduce TBL into a university program

In recent years the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in Japan has expressed its desire for English language educators to move away from more traditional teacher-centered models of instruction and adopt approaches that focus on communication skills and group work.This paper reports on a project that attempts to respond to this objective, describing efforts to introduce 'tasks' into a university-level EFL program.The paper begins by outlining the rationale for selecting tasks to develop communication skills.The paper then describes how an ordering and sorting task was designed and administered to a class of adult learners of English at APU Ritsumeikan University to develop their oral communication strategies and to draw the learners' attention to the usage of potentially problematic features of the language such as articles.The paper then reports how these efforts led to the wider use of tasks in an EFL curriculum and concludes by discussing the issues that arose from using tasks in this particular learning context.