This week’s focus was on task design and we had to carry three readings – all were very different but really interesting and they all made me reflect on the materials I use and also the materials I design i.e. worksheets, which I really appreciated as it showed some key flaws in both.
Hughes (2006) article Over to you…designing an exercise was short but concise and its seven clear principles encouraged me to reflect on my worksheet design, notably Principle 3 give numbers for reference, which sounds really obvious. Hughes states that this helps “students turn to their partners and say ‘so what did you get for number 4?’” A really basic principle, as Hughes states, but one I hold my hands up and admit i don’t do. Principle 4 Give an example is also something I don’t do in writing but do orally, before they start an activity. I think that including the written example in the worksheet is really useful because the learners will have a point of reference, a model, to refer to. And lastly, Principle 7 Cater for early finishers; personalisation and communication is something I am always aware of and will on ad-hoc basis give them further instruction to extend an activity but the learners are not aware of this until they finish early. Perhaps I could, as Hughes suggests, end the worksheet or activity list (1a, b and c) with an open activity that allows for greater and more personalised communication. However, if oral communication, there would need to be at least two early finishers, something that cannot be always be predicted. An alternative could be an anchor activity (Blaz 2016) such as an on-going reading or writing task that they can return to when they finish early and also something they could continue out of class.
The use of the word activity in the paragraph above was explored in great detail in the seminar, as were the words task and exercise. I must admit that I have used these words interchangeably without really recognising the difference and looking at my course book French 1, Palgrave foundations (2008), the only word it seems to use is exercise. I did at first question the importance of this distinction because it may have just been semantics and perhaps a translation issue from French to English as French has fewer words than English and therefore each words carries more definitions. Likewise, I pondered does it really matter what we call them? Do learners care? And then we started to define them and actually it made me realise that understanding the term enables you to understand what you are asking from your students and the cognitive level demanded by them as in Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956).
The in-class discussion and research offered by Paul suggests that actually there is quite a difference between the three words:
A task is must have these four features (Ellis 2011, p.212)
- Focus on meaning
- Should be a ‘gap’
- Learners rely on their own resources
- There is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language
It is “what the teacher provides” (Coughlan and Duff 1994) and the activity is what the learner actually does. Penny Ur’s definition of task includes task for specialised use and task for generalised use, where the aim of the task is “to activate learners to engage with the material” (1988, p.17)
Through discussion we deduced that exercises are what teachers set and have a specific linguistic focus. My course book is therefore void of tasks that encourage this active language of students and higher-level cognitive activities. The exercises are heavily grammar and lexis focussed and follow an inductive approach to grammar teaching. There aren’t meaning focused tasks, where learners have to rely on their own resources to produce a clearly defined outcome but instead the course book offers ten units that focus on themed or situation language and incorporate a mixture of listening, matching, reading, writing, and grammar exercises.
The pre-seminar task actually involved creating a taxonomy for task types to deconstruct a unit from this same book, to see what task types are being used and then consider why they are used at a particular stage in the unit. I found this task really challenging but equally very interesting in terms of a) the usability of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence’s and b) the content and processes offered by the course book are really very limited.
In order to create the taxonomy I created an excel spread sheet that had the learning objectives in the left column and Bloom’s Taxonomy levels in the top row, with each level including Gardner’s multiple Intelligences so that I could identify three aspects of each exercise:
- It met the learning objectives of the course
- Which cognitive level it meets (from simplest to hardest)
- Which learning styles it meets
- What communicative competency it involves
Please se emy taxonomy Taxonomy for evaluation-236380w used to evaluate this unit:
As you can see from the table, which I am aware could be hugely improved, there are no exercises that address the higher cognitive levels of evaluate or create and only two that enable learners to analyse. What does this suggest about a course book designed for beginner learners’ of French? Perhaps the authors may have purposefully avoided writing exercises that actively engage learners in these higher cognitive tasks because they are beginners. However I don’t agree and although this is the first time that I have evaluated the coursebook in such a micro manner (Ellis 2011), I do consciously respond to the course book through 1. Selection 2. Deletion 3. Addition and 4. Change (McGrath 2016) its exercises to ensure that learners are reasonably challenged, that they deduce meaning and communicate as authentically as possible to create their own meaning and discover new lexis, grammar, pronunciation, etc.
The results from the taxonomy similarly suggest that the exercises respond to a limited number of learning styles: Verbal/ Linguistic and Visual/ spatial. There are three exercises that I believe are more naturalistic in that learners have to show that they understand the listening exercise through listening and report on it. Likewise, exercise 7 asks for learners to listen and identify all the excuses and perhaps report back on it to the class.
My coursebook, from this evaluation of this unit, is extremely limited in its types of exercises but also how it responds to learners needs and styles. As Maley points out, in classrooms there is “a complex trade-off between the three major elements in the equation: the materials, the teacher and the learners” (2011, p379) and what is needed “is greater flexibility in decisions about content, order, pace and procedures” (Prahbu 2001 in Maley 2011, p. 379) of the coursebook. Perhaps, what is needed is an acknowledgement of the need of critical awareness; that coursebooks will need to be adapted to the context and its learners and if we are readily aware of this we won’t have these misconceptions of what course books should offer. What I want for my learners is not necessarily what you want for yours and ultimately what we want is not what they want, need or perceive as important.
References
Blaz, d. (2016) Differentiated Instruction: A guide for World Laanguage Teachers (2nd ed) Oxon: Routledge
Ellis, R. (2011) macro- and micro-evaluations of task-based teaching. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development language teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. pp/ 212-235
Maley, A. (2011) Squaring the circle- – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment. In Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials development in language teaching (2nd Edn) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 379 – 402
McGrath (2016) Materials evaluation and Design For language teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pp. 69 – 78