English Teachers’ Day 21 OCT 2010

Workshop: Taskification at lower level Anne Zimmer Frank Schmit

TBL: Jane Willis

•  Task-based teaching is about creating opportunities for meaningful language use; in other words, learners are not simply speaking or reading to practise a structure or a new set of lexis, or writing to display control of certain language items, but to communicate something worthwhile to others.

It involves making learners want to

•  understand something they hear or read so that they can satisfy their curiosity or act on that information;

•  interact (in spoken or written form) in order to achieve a specific goal.

•  It also involves enabling and encouraging them to use as much English as possible during this time.

Tweaking instructions

•  Even if your text-book doesn’t contain many task-like activities, it is often possible to ‘taskify’ text-book materials and to ‘tweak’ instructions to promote opportunities for meaning-focused interaction. In this session we shall explore ways this can be done, taking into account time available, class size and students’ needs.

Origins and main characteristics of TBL

•  According to Jeremy Harmer, TBL represents ‘a natural extension of Communicative Language Teaching. In TBL, the emphasis is on the task rather than the language.’

•  In the context of TBL, learners are thus asked to complete real-life tasks, such as listing and describing their hobbies, or retrieving information from a school timetable.

•  Once this task has been accomplished, students’ attention is drawn to the linguistic elements and stylistic techniques that they have used, and if necessary, they are given the opportunity to correct or improve the latter.

àFocus on form comes after the task, unlike in PPP / ESA

Origins and main characteristics of TBL

•  Harmer thus points out that ‘instead of language study leading to a task, the task itself is the main focus and jumping-off point for subsequent study.’

•  This approach puts communicative activities at the heart of learning. By preceding formal language input with a more practical and authentic activity, TBL allows one to circumvent students’ frequent disinclination towards the study of grammatical structures, as well as to encourage their participation.

Rationale

•  Grammar based teaching does not achieve acceptable levels of competence: most students taught mainly through conventional approaches such as PPP leave school unable to communicate effectively. (Stern 1983)

•  Learners strive to mean; meaning being a social construct. Without this incentive, they are not likely to construct a workable “lexico-grammar.”

à CONVEYING MEANING is the primary focus; focus on form comes second.

Seven types of tasks:

•  Listing

•  Ordering and sorting

•  Matching

•  Comparing

•  Problem solving and prediction

•  Sharing personal experiences

•  Projects and creative tasks

Designing tasks

Rather than asking “Is this a task?”,

ask “How task-like is it?”

•  You can determine how task-like a given activity is by asking the following questions. The more confidently you can answer yes to each of these questions, the more task-like the activity.

1.  Does the activity engage the learners’ interest? 2.  Is there a primary focus on meaning? 3.  Is there an outcome? 4.  Is success judged in terms of outcome?

Is completion a priority? 5.  Does the activity relate to real-world activities?

Practical example

Guess who is being described

•  Context: Elementary to Pre-Intermediate A2-B1

•  Pre-Task: brainstorm vocab clothes, physical features

•  Task: pick sbo. from audience and start describing them: others guess OR audience asks Y/N questions to identify person

•  Focus on form: Present S / C; specific lexis; Q-formation