Today we take a look at Tasks themselves.
Tasks are the theme of this chapter in Bill VanPatten’s book While We’re On the Topic. The full title of the chapter is “Tasks Should Form the Backbone of the Communicative Curriculum”.
Obviously, VanPatten considers tasks not simply important but integral and central to Contemporary Language Teaching / Communicative Language Teaching. Of course, VanPatten does not mean the “Communicative Method” as it is often (mis)understood and practiced, i.e. Present – Practice – Perform.
To understand how Tasks can form the backbone of a curriculum, as well as why they should, we have to know what Tasks are. VanPatten provides a definition of Tasks, gives examples of Tasks, and contrasts Tasks with Activities and Exercises to help us understand what he means. He begins with the following statements about tasks:
Tasks are the quintessential communicative event in contemporary language teaching.
Tasks involve the expression and interpretation of meaning.
Tasks have a purpose that is not language practice.
The rest of the chapter is an elaboration, examination, and justification of those statements. At that, VanPatten does not address all possible Tasks or even all possible kinds of Tasks. He limits the discussion to those he considers best in contemporary language classes, admitting that he has a bias as a university professor.
The first Task that VanPatten presents is one he calls “At What Age?” It consists of three steps:
1. Write down at what age a person typically does certain activities. (A list of activities follows.)
2. Interview someone in class; ask the person the questions and write down the response.
3. Class discussion follows. The instructor polls the class about the answers students gave, has students aggregate the answers, and then introduces additional information from the most recent US census.
The second Task is called “For Your Instructor” and is for more advanced students. It, too, consists of three steps:
1. Students receive a sheet of paper with sentence frames to provide information to the professor about fellow students.
2. Students create questions to elicit the information requested. If they need help, they may ask the instructor. Whereas the “At What Age?” Task is intended for beginning learners and is highly scaffolded in the language area, this one requires students to create their own questions.
3. Students interview one another and write down the answers to provide information to the instructor.
What makes these Tasks? They contain the expression and interpretation of meaning, and there is a communicative purpose other than “to practice language”. In both cases, the purpose is cognitive-informational.
Although someone might focus on certain surface similarities – in both instances, students are asking (and answering) questions – the purpose and communicative element are entirely different for the Tasks as compared to the Exercises originally given. (See last week’s post.)
The Exercises do not focus on the interpretation and expression of meaning. In fact, as I noted last week, in the “Est-ce que …?” Exercise, meaning is utterly irrelevant and may, in fact, be a hindrance to the successful accomplishment of the exercise.
The purpose of the Exercises is to practice language.
This, then, is the difference between a Task and an Exercise:
A Task requires the expression and interpretation of meaning and has a communicative purpose other than language practice, (2017, p. 80)
whereas
An Exercise lacks any intent to express or interpret meaning and has the explicit purpose of practicing language. (2017, p. 84)
Here, VanPatten distinguishes between an Exercise and an Activity. In his original examples, the second one (“Interview your partner and find out what he or she did last night”) is an Activity. What’s the difference? An Activity is partially communicative. That is, expression and interpretation of meaning are necessary to the Activity, but it lacks a communicative purpose other than to practice language.
To review, here are the distinctions that VanPatten makes:
A Task focuses on expression and interpretation of meaning and has a communicative purpose other than to practice language.
An Activity at least seems to have a focus on expression and interpretation of meaning, but its purpose is to practice language.
An Exercise does not involve the expression and interpretation of meaning, and its purpose is to practice language.
VanPatten utterly rejects Exercises as a strategy for language acquisition. He also provides an explanation for why a thoughtful teacher might use them. Leaving aside the possibility that a teacher uses Exercises because they are in the textbook or because the teacher did Exercises in language class, VanPatten notes the following theoretical basis for including Exercises:
Since Exercises have the purpose of practicing language, the instructor who uses them must believe that practicing vocabulary or grammar is “how you learn it”. If this is a deliberate practice and not simply thoughtless implementation of the familiar, then the instructor must believe that language acquisition happens in a particular way, i.e. through conscious learning about the language. As VanPatten has shown, however, this is not how language is acquired. “We know that language acquisition happens as a complex, constrained process that involves input … and internal mechanisms …” (2017, p. 85)
I’ll close this week’s discussion with the following quote from VanPatten:
Exercises fail as events that promote or cause acquisition, because they do not account for the most basic sketch of acquisition we have constructed after almost four decades of research. In short, Exercises lack input and do not provide the kind of data the learning mechanisms need for creating language in the learner’s mind/brain. At best, they waste time that could be used doing other things in the communicative classroom. (2017, p. 85)
Note: I have followed VanPatten’s convention of capitalizing Tasks, Exercises, and Activities. This is, in part, to distinguish Activities from activities. The former (Activities) are specifically defined as having a partial communicative focus but a purpose of practicing language, i.e. a technical definition of the word; the latter (activities) are simply the different things we do in class, i.e. the general meaning of the word.
I believe this gives us plenty to think about, so next time I’ll take a look at the kinds of Tasks that VanPatten presents, how to work with Tasks, and the implications for language teaching.