Adapting TBLT to different educational contexts

The paper aims at presenting task-based activities for English learning promoted in Italy as follow-up activities of the PETALL European project. In particular, a close cooperation among teachers and teacher trainers aimed at realizing learning tasks “that “travel well”, i.e. tasks that can be easily applied regardless of the educational context or of the cultural and geographic divides” (Lopes 2015). With such goals learning tasks were designed for two educational contexts that were until now less investigated, since related to the recent restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic: remote foreign language teaching to preschoolers (3-5 years) and foreign language teaching with social distancing, in particular exploring game-like activities inspired by Map Tasks, taking advantage of their inherent constraint on distance. In-service teacher training courses were organized for both projects and experimentation in four Italian schools is here illustrated, with a selection of tasks for different targets and different educational contexts.