A Conceptual Model for
Integrating Information Literacy and Task-Based Language
Teaching: Rethinking English Language Instruction in
Nigerian Secondary Schools
Basilia Igbokwe¹, Nkechi Priscilla
Nwanekezie²*
ABSTRACT
English occupies a distinctive
place in Nigerian secondary education, as both a school subject and
a medium of instruction across much of the curriculum. Classroom
English is often geared towards examination preparation, while the
skills needed to locate, question, compare and use information
receive limited systematic attention before tertiary education. This
conceptual paper addresses both concerns together. It reports no
empirical data; instead, it develops a model, grounded in an
explicit, integrative synthesis of the literature, that incorporates
selected information literacy practices into Task-Based Language
Teaching (TBLT) at the Senior Secondary School Two (SS2) level. The
model adapts the six frames of the Association of College and
Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for
Higher Education to age-appropriate learning outcomes and links them
to the pre-task, task, planning and report, and language-focus
stages of Willis's task framework. It connects tasks to recognised
English curriculum outcomes, including comprehension, summary,
argumentative writing, formal writing and oral presentation, and it
relies on newspapers, textbooks, library resources, radio
transcripts and other locally available materials rather than
assuming technology-rich classrooms. The paper offers operational
definitions of the expected outcomes, five testable propositions and
an illustrative three-period unit, with adaptations for very large
classes and schools with minimal library resources. It argues that
the English classroom can be a practical setting for developing
language and information judgement together, while stressing that
the proposed relationships remain hypotheses that require empirical
testing in Nigerian secondary schools.
Keywords: information literacy; task-based language teaching;
English language teaching; Nigerian secondary schools; conceptual
model.
