TASK AND A FOCUS ON FORM

TASK AND A FOCUS ON FORM

1. Methodological Approaches

   • Prabhu: A weaker form of CLT in which a focus on form in communicative tasks is considered desirable and useful in terms of promoting second language acquisition
   • Rod Ellis: Provide learners with a necessary focus on form, communicative task could be designed to reflect any of three main approaches
     • conscious-raising activities
       • Expect learners to produce sentences with a target languages structure
       • two sets of sentences, two different grammatical structures, two uses of the same structure
       • firstly: learners are not expected to produce the target structure
         • secondly: learners may not actually learn the structure until a later date

2. focused communication activities

   • tasks in which a focus on form is engineered not so much by the desing of the task

3. interpretation activities

   • the learner is again not required to produce the target structure, but is merely exposed to the languge
     • It is a listening activity as opposed to a production grammar activity
       • task would require learners to listen to this input in order to identify the meaning of the sentences containing this particular structure

4. Rob Batstone: Insists we need to use tasks in the language classroom which, while being communicative, require students to focus on form

   • Suggests that a focus on form and meaning can be engineered through task design and through manipulating the conditions under which the task is performed

5. task desing

   • learners have to pay attention to form while communicating is to make the form absolutely central to the meaning of the task