Researching Pedagogic Tasks

Second Language Learning, Teaching, and Testing

Martin Bygate, Peter Skehan, Merrill Swain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317876342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Researching Pedagogic Tasks brings together a series of empirical studies into the use of pedagogical tasks for second language learning, with a view to better understanding the structure of tasks, their impact on students, and their use by teachers. The volume starts with an introduction to the background and key issues in the topic area and is then organised into three sections:

• the first section focuses on the language and learning of students on tasks
• the second on the use of tasks in the language classroom
• the third on the use of tasks for language testing

Each section begins with a succinct section introduction, and the volume concludes with an afterword relating the theme of the volume to issues in curriculum development. The chapters include both experimental and qualitative approaches to the topic, some providing original accounts of specific studies, others offering overviews of linked series of studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Martin Bygate, Peter Skehan and Merrill Swain

Towards a Researched Pedagogy

Pedagogy can be defined as ‘intervention into thought and behaviour which is concerned to promote learning processes for intended outcomes’. By definition it therefore simultaneously involves decisions by teachers, action by learners and perceptible outcomes, both immediate and over time. Tasks are a central element of language pedagogy, and hence find themselves pivotally placed within this three-way relationship: their design can affect their use by teachers in the classroom, the actions of learners and the performance and learning outcomes. This book explores that relationship.

Pedagogy has been studied for centuries. However, much of that study has been based on principle, prescription and analogy. In contrast, a researched pedagogy (Leung, 1993) scrutinises pedagogic activity to assess its modes of implementation, its operation and its outcomes. This volume builds upon a growing number of previous publications to bring together a series of studies which investigate tasks in this way. Overall this is a very long-term project. A volume such as this can only sample a small range of tasks, in a limited number of contexts, with relatively few students, under a restricted range of conditions. There is a substantial range of pedagogic activities that remain to be researched, in a vast range of circumstances. In contrast, then, this collection makes a small contribution to the field. Yet this is the only way for progress to be made: pedagogy needs to be founded on systematic as well as enlightened observation. Systematic contributions will often be small, but no less valuable for that.

In fact, research into pedagogic tasks is one of a growing number of areas of empirical research which have emerged since the early 1980s. One of the basic functions of empirical research into language pedagogy is arguably feedback to the teaching profession, so that, as Brumfit argued ‘we are able to attempt to assess the effectiveness of our educational system’, and in order to receive ‘information about alternatives to traditional methods, so that the alternatives can be introduced, in some systematic way, into the system’ (Brumfit, 1980: 132). Following the discrediting of the large-scale experimental research projects of the 1960s and early 1970s (see, for example, Brumfit, 1980; Howatt, 1984; Ellis, 1985; Johnson, 1996), the 1970s had seen a highly significant period of largely conceptual research in language teaching. This culminated in a series of landmark publications (such as Stevick, 1976; Wilkins, 1976; Widdowson, 1978, 1979; Munby, 1978; Brumfit and Johnson, 1979; Breen and Candlin, 1980; Canale and Swain, 1980).

Three particular themes were to permeate subsequent thought. First, communicative language teaching was explicitly a post-method approach to language teaching (see notably Brumfit and Johnson, 1979; and Brumfit, 1988), in which the principles underlying the use of different classroom procedures were of paramount importance, rather than a package of teaching materials. Second, the most fundamental element of the approach was its explicit emphasis on the role of authentic communication within classroom contexts. Third, the measure of effectiveness was no longer simply the ability to use language accurately (Widdowson’s ‘usage’, 1978); it became the ability to use language accurately and appropriately in communicative contexts. These three themes had a strong influence on the nature and scope of subsequent empirical research, providing a justification for a narrowing of the focus from the earlier concern with the impact on learning of whole methods or courses, to the impact on learning of particular activities or interactions.

Multiple Perspectives on Tasks: Teaching, Learning and Testing

The three themes have had a major impact upon the nature of language teaching. One aspect of this impact has been the growing importance attached to the use of tasks within language pedagogy (Prabhu, 1987), a change which has led to a burgeoning of activity around task-based concepts. This, in turn, has resulted in the problem that the term ‘task’ is interpreted in a number of different but systematic ways by different groups of people. The purpose of this section is to explore some of these multiple interpretations with a view to disentangling the different viewpoints, and locating them in characteristic different contexts. Misunderstandings arising from the different perspectives may thus be more readily identified, and even avoided.

As a starting point, it is useful to focus on two groups who have each appropriated the term ‘task’ for their own purposes: these are communicative language teachers, and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers. Earlier approaches to communicative language teaching, developing ideas originating in discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, suggested that requiring learners to express meanings would be an effective underpinning principle to motivate foreign language learning (Brumfit and Johnson, 1979). A wide range of imaginative classroom techniques were consequently developed in the 1970s and 1980s to implement such an approach, and provided teachers with a much greater range of activities on which they might draw, either as supplementary materials functioning in an adjunct manner to a main course-book, or as materials that could be integrated into main coursebooks.

Earlier interpretations of such activities represented them as methods of promoting interaction so that learners could express meanings in natural ways. Terms such as information gap activities (Harmer, 1991) or jigsaw activities (Geddes and Sturtridge, 1978) were used to capture how learners were required to use language for communicative purposes. As time went on, such activities were described increasingly as tasks, and attempts were made to develop methodologies and principles by which such tasks could be used effectively. In this way, the idea of task has, for many people, superseded the term communicative language teaching and portrays what happens when meaning-based language teaching is carried out systematically and as an alternative to instruction which focuses on forms (Long and Robinson, 1998). Significant publications of this sort are Prabhu (1987), who has articulated the feasibility of using a task-based approach to underpin an actual curriculum in India, and Willis (1996), who has put forward a set of principles by which tasks may be developed and used by teachers, building upon the production of a coursebook series (Willis and Willis, 1988). One might also draw attention to writers on process syllabuses (e.g. Breen, 1984) and project work (Fried-Booth, 1986), who have shown how tasks can be integrated into alternative frameworks for organising foreign language instruction.

The contrasting perspective on tasks has come from the work of SLA researchers. As the inadequacy of input as an explanatory construct to account for second language development became apparent (Swain, 1985), SLA researchers, too, began to focus on interaction and the output it triggered as causative influences on second language development. Theoretically, the viewpoint that interaction promoted negotiation for meaning, and that such negotiation provided ideal circumstances for SLA to proceed became, and remains, influential (Long, 1989; Long and Robinson, 1998). It was argued that such negotiation enables acquisitional processes to be catalysed, and that sustained development results. Negotiation itself is thought to ensure that there is a focus on form during the interaction, so that learners are provided with feedback to precisely those points of the interlanguage system which are malleable and ready to change. Swain (1985) extended this interpretation to theorise how output itself pushes learners to reflect upon language form so that interlanguage change is more likely.

Arising from such theoretically motivated concerns, researchers came to use the concept of task to account for the manner in which interaction was more or less likely to provoke negotiation for meaning, and published accounts of how different task features might be associated with such performance differences. Long (1989), for example, in an influential article, argued for the use of what he termed ‘closed’ tasks (e.g. agreeing on the objects needed in a survival scenario, i.e. requiring agreement on the outcome) rather than ‘open’ tasks (e.g. a discussion, where no required agreement is inevitable). Equally importantly, such theoretical accounts were matched by a strong commitment to empirical research. The claims about different task properties were seen as requiring empirical confirmation: simply making claims about the desirability of one task over another was regarded as vacuous – the claim had to be translated into empirical operationalisations and confirmation. As a result, a range of studies was published, and a range of empirical techniques was developed.

The two approaches, although sharing the concept of task as central, use this concept to address different problems. The pedagogic approach presents the problem as one of understanding how the behaviour of the teacher can be made more effective and how learners can interact with tasks more effectively. Any solution to this problem is likely to involve teachers, course designers, and materials writers drawing on their teaching experience to understand task properties and produce effective examples of tasks. This is essentially a pragmatic response to characterising and working with tasks. The research approach presents the problem as one of how tasks may be used as a device to uncover the effective engagement of acquisitional processes. Tasks, in this account, are a window enabling fundamental issues to be studied more effectively. In this approach the role of theory is more prominent, as is an explicit concern with methods of inquiry. Data gathering and data analysis are themselves of interest, as the methods by which hypotheses and interpretations are substantiated.

It is also possible to view tasks in terms of different groups of users. This focuses more on the context of task use, rather than the manner in which tasks are investigated. In this respect, one can explore whether a concern with tasks relates to:

• the activity of the teacher;
• the process of learning and the role of the learner;
• the assessment of learning.

In the first of these cases, one would be looking at the decisions to be made about teaching tasks. The decisions might be for pedagogic action, or for data gathering or theory testing, but they would, ultimately, relate to pedagogic activities. In the second case, the emphasis would be on what happens from the learner’s perspective. This would lead to an emphasis on what changes might take place in the learner’s interlanguage; what processes might be operative to facilitate desirable change, and how the learner might respond to, or even choose, a task. Finally, assessment implicates tasks as testing devices and explores what can be said about the nature of learning and of performance as seen through task-based measurement formats.

The two dimensions at work here – manner of working with tasks (pragmatic vs research) and user groups and contexts (teachers, learners, assessment)– interact. A matrix (Figure 1.1) begins to make this clear. The pragmatic vs research dimension distinguishes between informal, practical decisions on the one hand, and the theoretical, systematic, evidence-based decisions on the other. Then, one can consider that the vertical dimension focuses on what the decisions in each case will be about, and who will make them. Hence the first row is concerned with tasks as the unit of decision-making for instruction (which can be approached either in terms of practical decisions, or research decisions). The middle row is concerned with tasks as the vehicle for the learner and learning, so that decisions relate to effectiveness for each of these cases. The last row is concerned with decision-making about learning and achievement, whether these are informally conducted, or whether the decision is linked to systematic research.

Figure 1.1 Two dimensions underlying the study of tasks

Each of the cells in Figure 1.1 is worth further discussion. In the pragmatic/pedagogic teachers and teaching cell of the matrix (i.e. top left) it can be seen that the focus for task concerns teacher decision-making about instructional issues. A first point here is that, given the different ways tasks are used, there is a wide range of activity in this cell. First of all, there is the issue of what a teacher considers a task to be. This may simply involve a task as an element in a scheme of work. In such a case, ‘task’, for the teacher, may be synonymous with a relatively self-contained activity (Nunan, 1989). But teachers may also use tasks in longer sequences of instruction, and so a teacher might consider the term ‘task’ to include a wide-ranging extended pedagogic plan or scheme of work. This might comprise a task cycle, as described by Willis (1996), which could extend over a few lessons, giving them unity, and possibly focus on particular areas of language. In such cases, it may be the teacher’s intention, while the extended task is running, to provide principled support and feedback to induce learners to interpret tasks according to some pre-existing pedagogic plan. Alternatively, a task might be a theme which generates a whole series of lessons, in which case the teacher might well have in mind that longitudinal development on the part of learners should be fostered, and achieved, while only one (extended) task is being accomplished. In fact, ‘task’ viewed in this way bears a strong resemblance to project work (see below). Indeed, to extend this teacher perspective on tasks, one might even think of a task as an activity initiated by a teacher in full knowledge that the development of the task will require him or her to relinquish control, as learners together, and in conjunction with the teacher, ‘take possession’ of the task. In this view, the task would be a teacher-oriented device to engage learners in a worthwhile set of linked activities.

But in all these cases, it should be said that the purpose of using tasks is to engineer satisfactory pedagogic activities and outcomes. For example, a (self-contained) task may be chosen to ‘Machiavellise’ the use of a particular structure – cf. Loschky and Bley-Vroman’s (1993) necessary condition for a structure–task pairing. This may be done unavoidably, through task design (Fotos and Ellis, 1991) or it could be that the task prepares the ground for teacher activit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Tasks and Language Processing
• Part II: Studies of Tasks in Language Classrooms
• Part III: Task-based Approaches to Testing
• Afterword: Taking the Curriculum to Task
• Index