MEDIATION AND TRANSLATION TASKS IN TASK-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING: A CLASSROOM STUDY

Translation has an odd place in modern language classrooms. It was pushed out by communicative methods, and it is now coming back, but under a new name: mediation. The 2020 update of the Common European Framework gave mediation a full set of descriptors [1], and this makes it possible to use translation-like activities inside task-based language teaching without returning to grammar-translation. This paper reports a one-semester classroom study with 46 first-year students at a private university in Tashkent. One group worked with a standard TBLT task cycle; the other worked with the same cycle, but the tasks required students to pass information between Uzbek and English for a real listener. Mediation tasks produced better results on spoken performance and on the quality of the final written product, while the two groups were almost equal on a discrete-item vocabulary test. Students in the mediation group also spoke more willingly, which teachers of mixed-ability groups will recognise as the harder thing to achieve. The paper argues that mediation tasks are a practical way of bringing translation back into philological education as a communicative skill rather than as an exercise.

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