Kim I.A.

Taraz State University, Kazakhstan

Types of tasks used in Task-based approach

For past decades English teachers, have been looking for ways to move from teacher-centred classroom to the student-centred one. The aim was to make students more active in the process of learning. Students participate more willingly in the lesson and learn more when they take part in activities, involving true communication rather than learning different dialogues and making up different situations. These activities stimulate their interest; the students search for some new information, process it and use it in a definite way. They recognize the value of English, how it can be useful and how it can meet the needs of their future job. For achieving this many different approaches have been offered and task-based learning is among them. In Task-Based Language Learning, learning is carried out by performing activities in order to fulfill the task. The challenge is to use the language for communicative purposes in real situations. By doing this, the language is used in the natural context, making learning easy. Applying Task-Based approach students don’t use the language and the material which was selected and prepared before especially for the language classroom but it is selected and adapted from authentic sources and then “drawn from the students” in order to fulfill the task set before them, using .

Originally Task-Based Language Learning was offered by N. Prabhu (India). The main idea of this approach is that students focus their attention on the task rather than the language, as it is based on creating the optimum conditions for language learning. Later this approach was reviewed by Jane Willis.

Now it is natural to ask a question: and what is a task and what types of tasks can be applied here? There is a range of definitions of this notion, but probably the most successful is given by William Littlewood. He offers the following characteristics of tasks:

· Tasks are activities in which students work purposefully towards an objective.

· The objective may be one that they have set for themselves or one which has been set by the teacher.

· Tasks may be carried out individually or (more often) in groups.

· Tasks may be carried out in competition with others or (more often) in collaboration.

· The outcome may be something concrete (e.g. a report or presentation) or something intangible (e.g. agreement or the solution to a problem).

· They involve communicative language use in which the learners’ attention is focused on meaning rather than linguistic structures.

· They should be authentic and as close as possible to the real world and daily life experience of the learners.

· They should involve learners in various activities in which they are required to negotiate meaning and make choices in what, when and how to learn.

A task can be verbal, for example when it is given in the form of an oral or written text, or non-verbal, in case of a picture, or a combination of verbal and non-verbal.

According to Ribé and Vidal there exist three “generation” task.

In this type of task the basic goal is the development of communicative skills in a certain area of the foreign language being learnt. Possible examples are ‘role-play’ and ‘simulation’. Some authors make a distinction between these two types of activities. Whereas in a role-play there’s the construction of a fictional character, simulations place the learner in a possible situation relevant to their age and interests

The aim of the “first” generation tasks is “to develop students’ communicative ability in a specific type of situation or area of language”. The task is often centred on particular functions or a simple problem (often involving an ‘information gap’)

Here you can see an example of the first generation task:

You need to take a business trip in June to one or more of these places:

Mexico City, Mexico; Madrid, Spain; Vancouver, Canada; Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Go to your travel agent and ask about the weather there and what kind of clothes you should take. Use the language you have practised in class.

Using this simple, but close to the real life situation students can develop communicative skills in a natural way, performing a very common task.

The “second generation tasks” are aimed at developing not only communication skills but also general cognitive strategies of handling and organising information, such as:

analysing what information is needed in order to complete the task, deciding on procedures, collecting information, selecting relevant data, presenting data in an organised way, analysing the process and results.

The students act in the situations very similar to real, therefore they need a wide range of language. They also need to find the information and to report it.

Language work very important here as with the help of language students do authentic communicative work. They use different structures, vocabulary and speech. The students read the information, process it and prepare reports in English.

This example can illustrate the second generation task:

What do you think?

A recent study concluded that the world population will double to 10 billion by 2050. Do you think enough food can be produced to feed all of these people?

1 Students decide: what they need to know; how to get this information, where to get the information, when to obtain the information; the kind of interviews they want to work out; the language they need.

2 Students carry out the research and put the information together.

3 Students select relevant data, decide on a format (posters, transparencies, etc.) for their presentation.

4 Students make a report and present it.

Third Generation Tasks

With the help of the third generation task the students not only develop their cognitive and communicative skills, but they also develop their personality learning a foreign language. For example: you are a group of people who are against mandatory military service

The objective of this task is to analyse the information about military service in your country and other countries in the world.

1 Working on this task, students brainstorm the problem of military service.

2 They are divided into groups according to their interests. In groups they decide what information they need and how it should be organized. They make a research on the topic and work out the way of its presentation.

3 On the last stage students make a presentation and evaluate their activity.

Learners can group together by common interests. Each group decides what kind of information and the language they need. Students are encouraged to go to the library, to use the Internet in order to find relevant information. They then present the material to other groups of students and evaluate the results.

The teacher plays a particular role during the first stage, then the teacher becomes an observer or counsellor as this is a student-cantered methodology.

List of literature

1. Willis, J.: A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Longman, 1996.

2. Second language acquisition research and task-based instruction in Willis J. & D. Skehan, P. 1996

3 Task Based Learning of Grammar William Littlewood Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University

4 Littlewood, W.: Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

5 A flexible framework for task-based learning, published in Willis J. & Willis D. Challenge and Change in Language Teaching (Macmillan Heinemann). 1998