LANGUAGE TASKS AND EXERCISES: HOW DO TEACHERS PERCEIVE THEM?

Rosely Perez Xavier, Ph.D.Federal University of Santa Catarina

rosely@ced.ufsc.br

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.Activity 1. Observe the garbage cans below and answer the questions in English.

red garbage yellow garbage green garbage blue garbage can can can

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 2Activity 2

Great! - Book 2

Susan Holden e Renata L. CardosoMacMillan

Activity 3.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:

type of meaning involved to achieve the outcome (semantic or pragmatic),

interactive elements (presence/absence of an interlocutor; context for the input),

activity goal (linguistic or communicative),

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 TASKS

input

- Grammar-oriented activities

- Diconnected with the students’ lives or real situations.

- Meaning-oriented activities

- Related to real-life, meaningful, current, relevant, and familiar topics.

goal

- 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

expected outcome

- entail the repetition of the same structures along the activity.

- are close-ended activities.

- allow the use of different structures and vocabulary.

- are open-ended activities.

control

- 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 TASKS

cognitive demand

- require “mechanical production” and “obvious sentence formation”.

- 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

context of situation

- Presence of one or more interlocutors to whom the linguistic outcome is addressed. Design with group or pair work (e.g., “One group discovers the false phrases of the other group.”).

- A purpose is established for the students’ interaction (e.g., idea of competition in game-like exercises).

realism

- Grammar contextualization in text genres (e.g., dialogues, poems, letters).

- 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 task-

like. 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.