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Date Posted: 21:08:43 07/03/03 Thu
Author: Igor AL Silva
Subject: Task 9

Explain what a task-based approach is. Describe its main characteristics.

A task-based approach is a way of teaching which aims to provide students with “carefully graded activities or ‘tasks’” so their communicative competence can be developed. From this definition, it can be seen that the tasks get more complex bit by bit, following the developing and requirements of the learners communicative skills. These ‘activities’ make learners work with the target language and try to interact with it as if dealing with it in a real situation. The tasks tries to develop either accuracy and fluency, and seeking for it, they must be challenging for the language learner, that is, they are not supposed to be too difficult so that achieving meaning predominates and not too simple as in this case nothing is being learned or developed.” (Skehan, 1994:190). However, it is hard to find a good definition for tasks because there are many, such as:

. “one of a set of differentiated, sequenceable, problem-posing activities involving learners and teachers in some joint selection from a range of varied cognitive and communicative procedures applied to existing and new knowledge in the collective exploration and pursuance of foreseen or emergent goals within a social milieu” (Candlin cited in Long and Crookes 1992:38).

. “a goal-oriented activity in which learners use language to achieve a real outcome and learners use whatever target language resources they have in order to solve a problem, do a puzzle, play a game, or share and compare experiences. (Willis).

. An activity or action which is carried out as a result of processing or understanding language (i.e. as a response). For example, drawing a map while listening to an instruction and performing a command... A task usually requires the teacher to specify what will be regarded as successful completion of the task ( Richards, Platt and Weber 1985:289, cited in Nunan 1988:45).

. An activity which required learners to arrive at an outcome from given information through some process of thought, and which allowed teachers to control and regulate that process (Prabhu 1987:24, cited in Long and Crookes (1992: 35).

Besides, these characteristics of the task-based approach (mainly teacher’s control or guiding, arising difficulty/complexity level, communicative skills development, and challenge), I think that the main characteristic of this approach is activation of acquisition processes, and this activation needs basically three stages:

. Pre-task stage: takes into account cognitive complexity as a limit or factor in the moment of preparing a task and code complexity, which refers to structuring and interlanguage development and the use of pedagogic tasks to introduce and draw attention to aspects of the target language code.

. During-task stage: this stage is concerned with how the task is handled by the teacher, who needs to manipulate pressure.

. Post-task stage: this stage can be used to promote pedagogic goals, when students will produce a similar task as a way to work on the language itself.

In sum, the task-based approach works on communication as a process, by providing learner with a series of tasks whose level rises accordingly to learner’s communicative skills development.




REFERENCES:

The task-based approach http://simsim.rug.ac.be/staff/elke/recpast/taskbased.html
A new approach to Course Design: Task Based Learning http://www.tesolgreece.com/dinou01.html
Aspects of task-based syllabus design by David Nunan http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/syllabusdesign.html
The theoretical justification for task-based teaching and the tracking of competencies in such an approach
http://www.ncver.edu.au/research/papers/downloads/trconf11/Potter.rtf
A task-based approah to teachig English for science and techonology by Gregory Hadley http://www.nuis.ac.jp/~hadley/publication/kosentbl/taskbased.htm

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