Here I talk about the taxonomy of tasks Jade and I developed for the ‘Task Design and Evaluation’ session, and how we applied it to SpeakOut Intermediate.
You might also want to have a closer look at the framework we came up with so you can also find them in the gallery below. Enjoy!
A few extra thoughts
It was actually quite good fun to work out a different way to approach evaluating a coursebook (I love spreadsheets!). I don’t however think it’s complete. By applying this taxonomy to other coursebooks I’m sure that we’d come across different activity types to add to the list on our key.
Although I don’t suggest that this is an objective method for evaluation, it is much more detailed than the one Jade, Abdullah and I created earlier in the term (see my post on Materials Evaluation).
In combination with other methods of evaluation (like our first effort), we begin to get a bigger, perhaps more complete view of a coursebook. Of course, ideally they should be applied to a whole book, not just one unit like we did here. Additionally due to the subjective nature of evaluation, the frameworks would also be completed independently by a number of teachers.
I really enjoyed this presentation. I think you did a fantastic job. I like how you worked out what makes a task and how you analysed focused/unfocused + open/closed tasks ratio. I guess there is a time and a place for all types of activities but some are more important than others. In my case, for example, I was applying Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking skills and realised that most of the tasks in the coursebook I’m currently using require low order thinking skills and sadly don’t encourage any high order thinking skills. This taxonomy of tasks exercise helped me to get a better understanding of what activities I should use in my classroom.
Thanks Anna! I think it made me recognise how important it is to analyse a coursebook at this level. Without doing do, students can really miss out on certain skills (language-related or otherwise) and teachers might not even realise it.
Impressive!