Tasks taxonomy

For the tasks session, me and Kris decided to look at unit 4A from New English File Upper Intermediate. I thought that it would be a good idea to look at this book in particular because I have found it to contain a nice eclectic mix of tasks which focus on the skills in a fairly even and balanced way. When trying to come up with a taxonomy to categorise the types of task, I thought it would be interesting to see if we could come up with one without initially reading up on already established criteria to help us form one. My approach was to basically list every task in the unit from exercise 1, a,b,c, etc., right through to exercise 6 at the end of the unit. Instead of writing the instructions of each task as it is written in the book, I made a note of the type of task each one was, for example, gap-fill, matching exercise, song, etc.

Another part of the pre-seminar task was to try and find a pattern of why some tasks are given at a particular stage of a unit. This was something that me and Kris found quite challenging, so we tried thinking of further ways in which could categorise each task. I had the idea of categorising them by which skill they are focusing on, i.e. speaking, writing or pronunciation. Using the first list that we made, we went through each task again in an attempt to classify them by their skills focus and then used a colour coding system to highlight each task with its appropriate skills focus. The colour code aligned with each skills focus, for example, red for grammar, purple for speaking, yellow for writing, etc. By using a colour code, it became easier for us to see a pattern in what kind of language aims were being focused on where and when in the unit and it also helped us to identify a rate of frequency of the different types of skills that were on offer.

What we found in terms of what tasks popped up where was that all the sections more or less focused on their main skill, i.e. the vocabulary section contained tasks which mostly focused on learning new words but had a speaking task at the end of the section. This was fairly common throughout all the sections in the book. There seemed to have been some intention to put in a speaking task at the end of exercises 1, 2 and 5. We guessed that the reason for this was because the authors wanted to increase the communicative element in the unit by spreading it across a wider range of sections in the form of speaking tasks. Another thing we noticed was there was a widespread of vocabulary tasks in exercises 1, 2 and 5, with 1 and 5 not being specified as vocabulary sections. There was of course a section on pronunciation in the unit but you can immediately see how insignificant it looks compared with the other sections in the unit. This is fairly common throughout all coursebooks and I think sends students the wrong message about the importance of pronunciation in the language.

The final step in creating our taxonomy came from an idea of Kris’s and that was to try and speculate what each task is doing or rather, how the student may benefit from it. We also asked ourselves why the author had decided to put a particular type of task in the unit, was it for genuine concern for the learners or simply a requirement of the publisher? From what we had gathered, a lot of the tasks in the unit seemed to be there for the sake of being there, like they were meeting a quota set by the publisher. For example, the unit has to have so many gap-fill exercises and a set amount of matching exercises and has to have a pronunciation section, no matter how small. Another example was looking at the song at the end of the unit and we discussed what significance it had by being at the end and came up with the idea that it is a reward task, a way to lighten up a lesson at the end of the week.