VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, [3], 4 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:01:33 07/04/03 Fri
Author: Daniela Elisa Duarte Ferreira
Subject: Task 9 - The Task-Based Approach

Task-based approach

The Task-based approach focuses on providing students opportunities to improve their communicative competence through developing tasks. Its main goal is getting students to achieve communicative competence by carrying out tasks that they will face outside classrooms.

According to Skehan’s schemes, classes based on the task-based approach can be divided into three main parts:

Pre-task stage: it’s the time when the topic is presented to the students and then they focus on the language forms that are going to be used in order to develop the following tasks. The teacher presents the tasks that all their requirements are clear for learners.

During-task stage: it’s when students have the chance to interact aiming developing the task. In order to decide the time limit, the teacher must consider factors such as the difficulty of the tasks proposed, the type of response wanted, number of participants in the group, etc.

Post-task stage: after students have completed the task, they can present its results to other groups, then they can focus on the language itself, “it may lead learners to switch attention repeatedly between accuracy and restructuring and fluency” (Skehan 1996:27).

Besides guiding the students during the class, the teachers also design the tasks. As Nunan (2001) pointed out, being aware of the difference between task, exercise and activity is important in designing tasks. The author states that, “task is a communicative act that does not usually have a restrictive focus on a single grammatical structure. It also had a non-linguistic outcome.” On the other hand, “an exercise usually has a restrictive focus on a single language element, and has a linguistic outcome. Finally, “an activity also has a restrictive focus on one or two language items, but also has a communicative outcome. In that sense, activities have something in common with tasks and something in common with exercises.”

In summary, students work on developing tasks that simulate real-life situations in which they need to negotiate meanings with each other and learn the new language form presented by using it. The teacher conducts the class, his/her job is to present the topics and give students a guideline to follow in order to reach the final objective.


References:
“A new approach to Course Design: Task Based Learning”
http://www.tesolgreece.com/dinou01.html
NUNAN, David. “Aspects of Task-Based Syllabus Design” In: The English Centre, University of Hong Kong, December 2001. http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/syllabusdesign.html
“The Task-Based Approach”
http://simsim.rug.ac.be/staff/elke/recpast/taskbased.html

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.