If Tasks should form the backbone of the communicative curriculum, then what kinds of Tasks are there?
This is the next step in Bill VanPatten’s discussion of Tasks in his book While We’re on the Topic (ACTFL, 2017).
VanPatten distinguishes between input-oriented Tasks and output-oriented Tasks. Input-oriented Tasks are Tasks in which the learners interpret communication and do not create meaning. Output-oriented Tasks, on the other hand, require learners to express (or create) meaning.
VanPatten envisions using primarily input-oriented Tasks with beginning students and reserving output-oriented Tasks for students who already have a significant amount of language. As he puts it,
Input-oriented Tasks allow for communication when learners have limited expressive ability. Output-oriented Tasks allow for communication when learners have more expressive ability.
The challenge for teachers is to envision and create input-oriented Tasks because we have been trained to think of Tasks as output.
Another characteristic of Tasks is that they are structured. “They have steps – a procedure – that guides students and lets them know when they have finished.” (2017, p. 88)
Tasks also have an immediate concrete informational goal.
Tasks can but don’t have to be project-based. It should be noted that all of VanPatten’s examples of project-based Tasks are output oriented. This raises the question of whether project-based Tasks could be input oriented.
Tasks can also progress from simple to complex.
VanPatten now comes to the question of Working With Tasks.
The first decision that the teacher must make is how to incorporate Tasks into the curriculum. There are, according to VanPatten, two options:
1. Drop them in at points that make sense thematically or
2. Let them drive the curriculum.
Obviously, from the full title of the chapter (“Tasks Should Form the Backbone of the Communicative Curriculum”), VanPatten prefers the second option, although he concedes the usefulness of the former.
Another way to Work With Tasks is to use them as measures of proficiency development. Here, VanPatten suggests using Tasks instead of the ACTFL can-do statements. Since, according to ACTFL, the can-do statements were never intended to be used for assessment, this means that Tasks are much more useful to the classroom teacher.
And so, Tasks can be used as alternatives to traditional testing.
Finally, VanPatten comes to the point of the chapter:
“Tasks can also form the backbone of the curriculum by driving the content of the course. This means abandoning textbooks and traditional classroom approaches and forming units around Tasks.”
In practice, this involves backward planning from the Task to providing the language and other information that students will need to complete the Task. In the simplest terms, this means that the teacher will
- Select the Task you want to be the “goal”.
- Determine what students need to know and know how to do in order to complete the Task.
- Develop activities [not Activities] and mini-tasks that work on what they [students] need to know and know how to do so that they work toward the goal.
Preparing students to complete a task means providing them with what they need to complete the task and avoiding too much extraneous material. As VanPatten notes, students may need only certain verb forms for a Task, and that is all right because acquisition is slow and piecemeal anyway.
To end the chapter, VanPatten suggests the following Implications for Language Teaching:
Exercises and Activities are not the foundation of communicative or proficiency-oriented language teaching.
This is because Exercises and Activities are not communicative – or are partially communicative at best – in nature and therefore are not particularly useful.
Textbooks and commercial materials need to move away from Exercises and Activities as the staples of learning and make Tasks central to classroom activities.
This is obviously a Call To Action. Textbook publishers will adapt and change textbooks when the demand changes. They respond to the market. Therefore, VanPatten’s call is to teachers, departments, and districts to begin demanding textbooks that are based on second language acquisition research and not just a reworking of the traditional grammar syllabus.
Instructors need alternative means to assess students and perhaps even move away from “assigning grades” to students at the end of the semester.
VanPatten states that “we need alternatives to traditional testing and grading”. While this sounds like a radical call, once one knows the history of grades and grading in education, it is really a call to return to practices that used to be common. Did you know, for example, that “grades” used to be narrative? That is, the instructor described what the student could do at the end of the course. A return to this sort of “grade” would require a wholesale overhaul of the education system, but that might not be such a bad thing. Teachers I know are not opposed to reforming the education system; they are opposed to the schemes and machinations of the current “education reformers” because of the nature of those schemes and machinations. But we won’t go further into that political quagmire.
Next week we will begin taking a look at what I consider VanPatten’s most problematic chapter in his book.