SLA Support for Use of Tasks and Grammar Teaching in Materials Design

 SLA Support for Use of Tasks and Grammar Interpretation Activiteis in Materials Design

Instructions: In chapter two of English Language Teaching Materials: Theory and Practice (Harwood, 2010), Ellis tells us that there are two kinds of tasks. 

• Focused Tasks: Ones that are designed to elicit or require a specific linguistic feature
• Unfocused Tasks: Ones that elicit general samples of learner language but are not designed with a specific feature in mind

Ellis also lists the following criteria that must be fulfilled to consider an activity a task and not a contextualized grammar exercise:

• There is a primary focus on meaning.
• Students choose the linguistic and nonlinguistic resources needed to complete the task.
• The task should lead to real-world processes of language use.
• Successful performance of the task is determined by examining whether students have achieved the intended communicative outcome.

Look at the following three materials for classroom activities and decide if they meet the requirements to be considered a task. If so, decide whether they are focused or unfocused tasks.

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Click to see full size image.

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Ellis also explains that structured-input activities, like input-enriched activities, are ones that highlight the target structure and bring it to the learner's attention (stimulus), but they also require the learner to process it in some way (the response). In addition, he gives the following criteria for designing structured input materials:

• The stimulus can take the form of spoken or written input.
• The response can take various forms (e.g. indicate true-false, check a box, select the correct picture, draw a diagram, perform an action), but in each case the response will be completely nonverbal or minimally verbal.
• The activities in the task can be sequenced to require first attention to meaning, then noticing the form and function of the grammatical structure, and finally error identification.
• Learners should have the opportunity to make some kind of personal response (i.e., relate the input to their own lives).
• Learners need to be made aware of common errors involving the target strucutre as well as correct usage.
• Structured-input tasks require the provision of immediate and explicit feedback on learner's responses to the input.

Analyze the material for the strucutred input task below and identify if all of the criteria are present in it already and if not, say what the teacher could do to ensure that all the criteria ar fulfilled. 

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Finally, Ellis describes the purpose of consciousness-raising tasks, outlines their characteristics, and gives some tips for their design. Characteristics of CR task are the following:

• There is an attempt to isolate a specific linguistic feature for focused attention.
• The learners are provided with data that illustrate the targeted feature and they may also be provided with an explicit rule describing or explaining the feature.
• The learners are expected to utilize intellectual effort to understand the targeted feature.
• Learners may be optionally required to verbaize a rule describing the grammatical structure.

Analyze the sample CR task below, say how it is structured, and discuss the possible learning benefits that this kind of activity can provide students of English.

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Ellis also provides the following information that can help you create your own consciousness-raising tasks. All CR tasks consist of two elements:

1. Data containing exemplars of the target feature
2. Instructions requiring the learners to operate on the data in some way

Types of Data: You can take into consideration the following options for creating the data that students will analyze.

• Authentic Text vs Contrived Text
• Oral Text vs Written Text
• Text in Discrete Sentences vs A Continuous Text
• Well-Formed Sentences vs Deviant Sentences
• Gap vs Non-Gap

Types of Operations: Students need to do something with the example text in order to raise their awareness about how the target feature works. Consider the following operations that Ellis suggests.

• Identification (e.g. learners underline the target structure in the data)
• Judgment (e.g. they respond to the correctness or appropriateness of the data)
• Completion (e.g. they are invited to complete a text)
• Modification (e.g. they are invited to modify the text in some way, for example, by replacing one item with another)
• Sorting (i.e., they classify the data by sorting it into defined categories)
• Matching (i.e., they are invited to match two sets of data in accordance with a stated principle(
• Rule Provision (e.g. they may be asked to state the rule they have discovered)

Ellis says that by combining different variations of data options and types of operations, we can create a huge variety of consciousness-raising tasks! "A CR task constitutes a kind of puzzle that, when solved, enables learners to discover how a linguistic feature works (Harwood, p. 49)."

Bibliography

Harwood, N. (2010). English language teaching materials: Theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.