Eastern Mediterranean University Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Nazenin Ruso received her MA degree in ELT and is currently a doctoral student working on her PhD thesis. She has training and certificates in COTE (Cambridge Certificate for Overseas Teachers of English) and LCCI (London Chambers of Commercial Industrial Examinations). Her research interests are social skills, service learning, values development and task-based learning. Increasing learners ’ motivation and performance has always been the primary concern of language teachers. The present study adopts an Action Research approach. A new approach, TBL, is applied to a traditional classroom situation with the aim of finding solutions to certain problems such as poor learner motivation. 55 EFL students from two English classrooms and the researcher, a Turkish teacher, participated in the study. In this study, learners ’ opinions about TBL are investigated through different data collection methods: a questionnaire, diaries and semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study reveal that implementing a TBL approach in EFL classes creates variety for the students. Moreover it enhances their learning, since TBL tasks encourage student involvement and lead to significant improvements regarding their language performance. The research participants suggest that they do not like teacher-directed lessons where they cannot find enough opportunities to express themselves in the target language