Task-Based Language Teaching gets a lot of support from the research field. Communicative tasks with a real purpose to fulfil, maybe a purpose related to ‘real life’, are claimed to be an efficient and enjoyable way to promote language learning.
I first discovered this type of activity back in the 1980s when they were sometimes called Task-Oriented Activities. They were common in the field of EFL/ESL, but less known in MFL classrooms. A classic book setting out their justification, with examples you could adapt for MFL, was Discussions that Work by Penny Ur, subsequently rewritten years later. It’s worth seeking out still.
My experience with communicative tasks was positive, but like some other teachers, I found them most effective with advanced students who have a much greater stock of vocabulary and grammatical skill to call upon. The biggest supporters of task-based methodology argue that they can work fine with younger learners if the emphasis of the task is on input, not output.
On the frenchteacher.net A-level page I have a good number of tasks of this type, where the emphasis is on meaning and accomplishing a goal, not so much language form. Among them is an adaptation of a Penny Ur task where a pair or small group of students has to arrange guests around a dinner table depending on a number of criteria and keeping in mind the personalities and views allocated to each guest. Another Penny Ur task involves designing the layout of a zoo based on animal characteristics. I designed a similar one about designing a school layout based on given criteria. Coming up with other ideas like this is an interesting, creative language teacher challenge.
A task I particularly like is called Ask the Experts (based on a task described by Nation and Newton called Ask and Move. This involves giving different paragraphs of written text to, say, three students. When the information in the paragraphs is combined, you get a summary of (in my examples) an A-level topic, such as family, immigration or New Wave cinema. The same format can be used with narrative texts.
The three ‘experts’ are quizzed in turn by the other students who have been given a set of questions to find answers to.
This is a ‘milling about’ task where you need roughly at least 8 students in the class. The questioners can only complete their answers by speaking to all the experts, who find answers from their paragraphs.
Subsequently, the questioners get their notes together to summarise the information.
This task is especially useful for dealing with informational texts which might be hard to exploit in other interesting, communicative ways.
In another enjoyable task, more of a role-playing one, pairs have to resolve parent-child situations and conflicts, such as the discovery of cannabis in a bedroom or an ‘undesirable’ boyfriend.
EFL is full of inventive lessons of this type, while MFL has remained a bit stuck in the mud, in my view. No great change since the 1980s.
To sum up, if you haven’t tried tasks like these, you might find that they freshen up lessons and appeal to students. Essentially, they provide the basic foodstuff for acquisition: input and interaction. With the added motivation they offer, you have a good recipe.
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