| Anotácia | In the past decades, communicative approach to language teaching become a widely preferred approach to teaching foreign and second languages. This article presented an overview of communicative principles and those of ´Task Based Language teaching´ (TBLT) and cursorily touches stages of TBLT lesson. The task of universities during initial foreign language teacher education is to prepare qualified and competent teachers. Curriculum and syllabi should integrate the academic discipline, extended periods of learning about the methodology of teaching, and a period of the application of pedagogical theory - teaching observation and practice in a school. The language policy of the EU emphasises the implementation of a new concept of foreign language teaching at primary and secondary schools. It means, as well as in Slovakian context, to prepare teachers-in-training to use more up-to-date communicative and humanistic approaches in their classrooms, in their practicum, after they graduate and begin teaching. Communicative competences are typical for language use. Unfortunately, during student teaching practice, we observed some stereotype in a student lesson preparation in terms of communicative approach and principles application. Summing up literature sources knowledge we deduce, that Communicative language teaching (CLT) principles are understood as rules, requirements and general standards, which are consistent with objectives of educational process and its essential regularities. CLT is based on beliefs that learners learn best if they participate in meaningful communication. Learners acquire language that is a little beyond their current level. As it is frequently misunderstood, CLT is not a method per se. It is a complex of principles. Its goal is to promote the development of real-life language skills by engaging the learner in contextualized, meaningful, and communicative-oriented learning tasks. Task-based language teaching is a natural extension of CLT. Learners acquire the language they need in order to accomplish the task. Tasks are close to their real life, and in doing them, learners need to communicate. Task is any activity in which meaning is given priority, resembles real world activities, its completion is preferential, and the evaluation of performance is based on its or ‘task’ outcomes. The active involvement of the learner is therefore central to the approach, and a rubric that conveniently captures the active, experiential nature of the process is ‘learning by doing’. Students learn by being forced to communicate with their peers to solve tasks. Fluency is the goal, rather than accuracy, and teachers are available for consultation, but do not correct language while students are working. TBLT is an “action-oriented approach” and involves tasks and texts. At lower levels, there is a tendency for tasks to be situation-based and for texts to be relevant to those situations. At higher levels there is a tendency for tasks to become more text-based, involving information exchange, summarising, and discussing in relation to those texts. To sort tasks by rising complexity, there are tasks requiring memory reproduction of knowledge, simple operations of thought and knowledge, complex operations of thought and knowledge, knowledge sharing, and creative thinking. We can find classroom communicative tasks (real, objective, pilot, and educational) in classroom situations, school curriculum, textbooks, and tests. To create interactive class using TBLT required precise lesson preparation. As we mentioned above, teacher students may have problem to write proper TBLT lesson plan. Traditional, accuracy-focused lesson planning is here to stay, but it is increasingly finding itself sharing attention with Task-Based Learning. A task-based lesson plan does not look much like the presentation – practice - production lesson plan, where a particular language item is presented by the teacher; it is then practised in a controlled way by the learners, and then finally used by the learners in freer practise activities. Task-based approach planning clearly takes into account the need for authentic communication. Typically there are three stages: Pre-task (Lead-in), Task preparation, Task realisation, Post task. In Pre-task stage teacher introduces the topic, gives relevant vocabulary, authentic material as a lead in; learners are involved to think about the topic. In Task realisation stage learners do the task, discuss and prepare own report to whole class. Teacher monitors and encourages learners without correcting and assists with regard to language advice. The third and final Post-task stage consists of analysis and feedback. The learners reflect on how they performed and practice new lexis. Some authors suggest instead of specific models (stages) of lessons more general structures. We agree to encourage teacher students to adapt lesson structures to the type of lesson complying three stages – input, learning and use. We believe that respecting communicative approach principles allows using any combination of methods, approaches and stages of lesson in foreign or second language teaching. (AH 1,05.)
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