Tasks, what are they?

Tasks, what are they?

1. What is a task?

   • "Activity or action which is carry out as the result of processing or understanding language" (Richards, Platt and Weber 1986)
   • "Any structured language learning endeavour which has a particular objective, a specified working procedure and a range of outcomes" (Breen 1987)
   • "The communicative task is a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language" (Nunan 1989)
   • Good tasks entail: (Candling 1987)
     • Encourage learners to attend to meaning
     • Give learners flexibility in solving problems their own way
     • Involve learners with their own personalities and attitudes
     • Challenging but not excessively demanding
     • The raise learners´awareness of the process of language use
   • Skehan (1997)
     • Learning tasks: focus on a formal feature of L2. Tend to have very specific learning outcomes. Focus only on linguistic competence
     • Communicative tasks, focus on meaning and tend to be done in small groups

2. The historical framework

   • CLT and Tasks
     • Learning a language implied not just linguistic competence but communicative competence
     • New classroom activities to encourage students to develop communicative competence
     • Gradual shift to in task design from mechanical form-based activity types to a more meaning-based type of task
   • Humanism and Tasks
     • Intrapersonal awareness
     • Interpersonal skills
     • Legutke and Thomas: Humanistic task presupposes particular views of the individual, of awareness, communication and learning deriving from non-language-learning disciplines.
     • Humanism played a central role in putting affect into the classroom
     • Main aims of these tasks are the development of self-other awareness within a climate of trust and togetherness
       • The L2 is seen as a medium through which these important issues are explored in class, making the L2 more meaningful, memorable and personally relevant
   • Process approaching to learning and teaching
     • (Breen 1984) Perhaps the most meaningful and accesible syllabus will be which deliberately provokes the shared creation of the real syllabus by the classroom group
       • Enabling learners to choose and sequence tasks for classroom use: A process syllabus could be superimposed upon any content because it directly address the shared activities of selecting, focusing upons, subdividing and sequencing appropriate subject matter activities.
   • Prabhu and the Bangalore project
     • Information-gap tasks
       • These involve a transfer of given information from one person to another or from one form to another or from one place to another (Prabhu 1987)
     • Reasoning-gap tasks
       • These involve deriving some new information from given information through processes of inference, deduction, practical reasoning or a perception of relationships or patterns
     • Opinion-gap tasks
       • These involve identifying and articulating a personal preference, feeling or attitudein response to a given situation
     • Prabhu´s procedural syllabus constituted a radical departure from contemporary classroom practice
     • His procedural syllabus is concerned with "what is to be done in the classroom rather than what is to be learnt (Prabhu and Carrol 1980)
     • Form is best learnt when the learner´s attention is on meaning
     • While conscious mind is working out some of the meaning-content, some subconscious part of the mind perceives abstractas or acquires some of the linguistic structuring embodied in those entitles, as a step in the development of an internal system of rules.
     • Prioritise receptive language for his learners because believes that the development of reception is also the earlier part of the development of production and learners will produce voluntarily when they are ready for it.
     • The basis for Prabhu´s approach consisted of a number of problem-solving tasks.
       • The learner´s natural desire to meet a challenge
       • The preoccupation with meaning or thinking which such problem-solving necessarily brings about
       • The incidental struggle with language use which such activity engenders
     • Classes in the Bangalore Project (secondary school) remained teacher fronted with between 30 and 55 students per class

3. Reference: Task-based Approach Anthology, IEXPRO University, Chiapas, México

4. Introduction

   • "Anything learners are given to do" (Burden and Williams)
   • What is involved in a language learning task has been interpreted differently by language teachers as approaches to foreign language teaching have changed.

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