Transcript LANGUAGE TASKS AND EXERCISES: HOW DO TEACHERS PERCEIVE THEM? Rosely Perez Xavier, Ph.D. Federal University of Santa Catarina [email protected] Florianópolis, Brazil.

LANGUAGE TASKS AND EXERCISES:
HOW DO TEACHERS PERCEIVE THEM?
Rosely Perez Xavier, Ph.D.
Federal University of Santa Catarina
[email protected]
Florianópolis, Brazil
SOME DEFINITIONS
Exercises
are "activities that call for primarily form-focused
language use." (ELLIS, 2003, p.3)
require a deliberate manipulation or practice of a
linguistic feature by the learner (items of vocabulary,
rules of grammar, semantic chunks).
involve both a linguistic purpose and an outcome
intended to show how well the learner is able to display
particular targeted forms.
promote language learning through an explicit and
intentional process.
SOME DEFINITIONS
Tasks
are activities that call for primarily meaning-focused
language use. (ELLIS, 2003; NUNAN, 1989; SKEHAN, 1998)
intend to engage learners in using the target language for
a communicative purpose (e.g., to show understanding, to
complete a form, to compare two pictures).
involve a defined outcome derived from some work done
using language for comprehension and/or production.
promote language learning through an incidental or
implicit process.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
How do pre-service Brazilian teachers of
English recognize exercises and tasks?
What aspects do they consider a task and an
exercise to have when devising and analyzing
them?
What is the scope of their misunderstanding?
METHOD
Participants
20 pre-service Brazilian teachers of English as a
foreign language.
They were attending the last year of an English
teacher education program in a federal university in
the south of Brazil
Most of them were in their twenties with little or no
experience in English language teaching.
METHOD
Data collection
All the participants were asked to perform three tasks:
to devise an exercise and a communicative task;
to compare three different written activities;
to identify the exercise(s) and the task(s), and
justify their answers.
ACTIVITIES
Activity 1. Observe the garbage cans below and answer
the questions in English.
red garbage
can
yellow garbage
can
green garbage
can
blue garbage
can
1. What’s the objective of these garbage cans?
2. What items are put in the red garbage cans? Give three examples.
3. What items are put in the yellow garbage cans? Give three examples.
4. What items are put in the green garbage cans? Give three examples.
5. What items are put in the blue garbage cans? Give three examples.
www.t4tenglish.ufsc.br
Activity 2
Great! - Book 2
Susan Holden e Renata L. Cardoso
MacMillan
Activity 3. Read the situations below and give your opinion
about the people's attitudes. Are they sensible or
insensible? Justify your answers.
For example: Mary is 15. Her boyfriend is 15, too. They decide to
marry.
They are not sensible because they are too young
to marry.
1. George is 17. He is dating Kate. She is 16.
George wants to make love with Kate, but she
doesn't feel ready for sex. She says 'no'. He
respects her decision.
2. Paul is dating Juliet. They are 17 years old. He
wants to make love with her. She says 'no'. He
breaks up the relationship.
3. David is dating Sandra, but he doesn't like her.
He likes Beth. Sandra knows that.
(XAVIER, 1999)
METHOD
Data analysis
ACTIVITY DESIGN – Foci of analysis:
activity goal (linguistic or communicative),
type of meaning involved to achieve the outcome
(semantic or pragmatic),
interactive elements (presence/absence of an
interlocutor; context for the input),
elements of realism and relevance (topic proposed,
cognitive demand),
elements of design (rubrics, example, input data)
METHOD
Data analysis
ACTIVITY COMPARISON – Focus of analysis:
Aspects considered in the participants' classification.
RESULTS
EXERCISES
input
goal
TASKS
- Grammar-oriented
activities
- Meaning-oriented
activities
- Diconnected with
the students’ lives or
real situations.
- Related to real-life,
meaningful, current,
relevant, and familiar
topics.
- Structural practice
- Language use,
conversational practice.
Tasks are seen as
enabling the students to
express their own
opinions and background
knowledge about a topic.
EXERCISES
TASKS
- entail the repetition
- allow the use of
expected of the same structures different structures and
vocabulary.
outcome along the activity.
control
- are close-ended
activities.
- are open-ended
activities.
- manifest more
language control on
the students.
- manifest less language
control. Thus, more
possible answers may
increase the chances to
enlarge the students'
linguistic knowledge, and
the teacher's possibility
to engage students in
conversation.
EXERCISES
- require “mechanical
production” and
cognitive “obvious sentence
demand formation”.
TASKS
- promote reflection and
critical awareness on
both language to be
used (how to say) and
the content to be
discussed (what to say).
In this sense, a task is
seen to focus students'
attention on both form
and meaning
simultaneously.
Features considered in the participants’ exercises
- Presence of one or more interlocutors to whom
the linguistic outcome is addressed. Design with
context of group or pair work (e.g., “One group discovers
situation the false phrases of the other group.”).
- A purpose is established for the students’
interaction (e.g., idea of competition in game-like
exercises).
- Grammar contextualization in text genres (e.g.,
dialogues, poems, letters).
realism
- Students’ immediate context or reality (e.g.,
familiar and famous people, sentences related to
the students’ lives).
Features considered in the participants’ exercises
relevance
- more cognitive demand on the students,
more reasoning on the targeted structures.
RESULTS (cont....)
Exercise and Task Design
 Only 50% of the participants were able to build a written
exercise.
 Only 30% of them were able to build a written task.
RESULTS
Frequent exercise types:
 Sentence or dialogue completion (30%)
 Sentence or noun phrase formation (20%)
Frequent task types:
 Group discussion (41,2%) with or without guiding
questions
 Role play (17,6%)
RESULTS
What is lacking in some participants’ task design?
 a defined outcome
E.g., A group discussion for the expression of
opinions about a topic.
(1) primary focus on meaning;
(2) communicative goal or aim (Ellis, 2003);
(3) it lacks an outcome, a communication problem
to be solved (Skehan, 1998).
CONCLUSIONS
1.
A primary focus on meaning and a communicative goal
are not alone enough to qualify a task. A defined outcome
is expected to be achieved, otherwise a task can be
interpreted as a conversational practice activity with no
problem to be solved.
If this is true, the following activities might not be labeled
as tasks:
a) Discuss, in groups, what you did on your last
vacation.

primary focus on meaning;

activity goal: to give an account of what you did...;

No final outcome. No communicative purpose.
b) Discuss, in groups, what you think about
Lula’s government.

primary focus on meaning;

activity goal: to express opinions about Lula’s
government.

No final outcome. No communicative purpose.
CONCLUSIONS (CONT...)
2. A communicative purpose or a problem to be solved can
be expressed in the written instructions of a task or
established during its implementation. If it is defined only
in the task implementation, then a non-task in its design
may become a task in its implementation. This is the case
of a meaning-focused activity with no outcome to be
achieved that receives an on-line supplementation
through the teacher’s command of what the students are
supposed to do with their exchanged input (e.g., classify,
compare, reach a consensus).
3. The teacher's decisions in class may not converge with
the written activity design, which means that the teacher
may enhance or subvert the design of an activity. In this
sense, the identity of a task/ exercise cannot be
determined by its design necessarily. In other words, the
instructions can signal a task or an exercise, but
depending on its implementation one can change into
another.
4. Since the tasks were interpreted as a production activity,
in particular a speaking activity that enables the
students to mobilize their own linguistic resources to
communicate their ideas, opinions, and feelings about
relevant topics, it is possible to conclude that tasks, for
the participants, seem to be more feasible to proficient
learners of English, who are expected to better manage
their linguistic and discursive knowledge in a
communicative context.
5. Tasks are perceived as an exercise when the teacher
interprets the expected outcome as a salient linguistic
product. This means that when the outcome involves the
same linguistic pattern throughout the activity (e.g.
lexical items that belong to the same semantic field, or
the same syntactic pattern intended to answer certain
questions), the teacher may subvert the task or detaskify
it (SAMUDA 2005) imposing a linguistic purpose on the
communicative content. In this sense, a focused task, for
instance, might be interpreted as an exercise, and thus
implemented as such. This would result in a perceptual
mismatch (cf. KUMARAVADIVELU, 1994) between the
task designer's intention and the teacher‘s interpretation
of the activity.
6. Traditional exercises are perceived as activities that
need to be modernized, enhanced, upgraded, or tasklike. In this sense, features that are particularly found in
tasks are incorporated into the design of the exercises.
REFERENCES
ELLIS, Rod. Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford: OUP,
2003.
KUMARAVADIVELU, B. The Postmethod Condition: (E)merging
Strategies for Second/ Foreign Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly,
v.28, n.1, p.27-48, 1994.
NUNAN, D. Designing tasks for the communicative classroom.
Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
SAMUDA, Virginia. Leading from behind: a role for task design
awareness. Paper presented in the Symposium: The role of the teacher in
TBLT at the 1st International Conference on Task –Based Language
Teaching, Leuven, Belgium, 2005.
SKEHAN, P. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford:
OUP, 1998
XAVIER, R.P. A aprendizagem em um programa temático de língua
estrangeira (Inglês) baseado em tarefas em contextos de 5ª série do
ensino fundamental. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, State University of
Campinas, Brazil, 1999.