TRAINING ON DEVELOPING WRITING TEACHING MATERIALS BASED ON TASK-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING (TBLT) PRINCIPLES FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS IN BANDAR LAMPUNG CITY

Abstract

Writing instruction in English remains challenging for teachers because the teaching materials used in classrooms tend to emphasize mastery of linguistic forms and are not always contextualized to students’ communicative needs. This condition highlights the importance of strengthening teachers’ competence in developing meaningful and communicative teaching materials. This community service program aimed to improve English teachers’ knowledge and skills in developing writing teaching materials based on the principles of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), particularly through the manipulation of task complexity within the framework of the Cognition Hypothesis. The program involved 30 English teachers from junior secondary, senior secondary, and vocational schools in Bandar Lampung. The training employed an andragogical approach consisting of conceptual presentations, discussions and analyses of task examples, workshops on teaching-material development, instructional simulations, and feedback sessions. The program was evaluated through a pre-test, observations during the training process, and a post-test involving the development of task-based teaching materials. The results showed that, in general, the participating teachers were able to develop better and more relevant writing teaching materials after participating in the training. The materials produced demonstrated the application of TBLT principles through more contextualized and communicative tasks oriented toward meaningful language use. These findings indicate that TBLT-based training can serve as an effective strategy for strengthening teachers’ professional competence in designing writing teaching materials that are more relevant to the needs of English language learning.