session nine

Session 9: teaching as doing, thinking& interpretation

Monday, December 7, 2009

Preparation

   Tasks, in ESL classes, have a crucial role. In fact, it is anything that learners are given to do but in a better sense it can be anything in which learners meaningfully interact with each other. However, the attitudes of the teachers toward the teaching-learning process, how they believe SLA is best facilitated and the approach to language teaching that they apply, highly influences on their interpretation of tasks and their use.

Assistance

   The topic of most importance in this session was the place of tasks in the language classroom. Different approaches hold different interpretations from the notion of language learning task. In GTM for example, to complete sentences and to give grammatically correct answers and in DM to observe and describe sth would be considered appropriate tasks. Yet, a procedural syllabus consists of a series of tasks in which the learners focus on meaning rather than form.

   Nunan(1989, 1993) considers tasks as consisting of six elements: the input data which is the material that learners work on, activities or procedures, goals, role of the teachers, roles of the learners and a setting. In another perspective, the task includes the elements of I (the individual's implicit contributions including his attitudes, experience, feelings and attitudes and explicit contributions including his perceptions and knowledge), we (framework of the group) and the theme ( a dynamic element taking shape in an interactional process between learners and teacher) which make together a theme-centered interaction.

    Many factors can affect the difficulty of tasks. Communicative difficulty, cognitive complexity, linguistic complexity, the learner factors including all that the learner brings to the task, amount of context provided, time available and so on.

    In a cognitive processing approach, a task can be considered as a mental act. Feuerstein's cognitive map maintains that seven elements are involved in a mental act. 1. The universe of content (the learner's background), 2. The modality (the language in which the mental act is expressed), 3. Level of complexity (the information required to carry out a mental act), 4. Level of abstraction, 5. Level of efficiency with which the mental act is performed. 6. The cognitive operations (the different processes involved), 7. The phase of the cognitive functions required by the mental act. Learning phase is organized into a simple sequence of: input→elaboration(where the language is processed)→output. Instrumental enrichment is a series of 400 cognitive tasks constructed by Feuerstein in which there is a focus on the importance of mediation and teach both language and thinking skills.

    From an educational view tasks can be defined as a manifestation of the teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning, learners' roles, learning style, level of challenge. In fact, in this perspective, the ways in which teachers mediate in their presentation of tasks is a crucial aspect. Moreover, the sense that learners make of the activities or experiences is of high significance in this view. However, of equal importance is the interaction between teachers and learners.

Application

    The task which I use in my classes should be meaningful to the learners. Since, according to a constructivist view, individuals tend to learn what they think is worth learning, these tasks should also be purposeful to them. Considering the model of theme-centered interaction of tasks, the task that I take to my classes should hold the three dimensions of this model. Furthermore, I need to be clear in my mind what my learning goals are, and attempt to implement these through the tasks that I use.