Tasks that work

Calling ELT gurus!! Let me tell me about some tasks that work! What you need to do is to think of goal-oriented activities where you are getting the students talking for a reason and to achieve some kind of goal. So, now I’ll stop rabbiting on and tell you what I need to tell you!

Here are some examples; getting students to design something; e.g. a restaurant, a bar etc and they need to think of specific areas; types of food, special offers, decoration, location etc. Get students making a leaflet of the best tapas bar in Seville and then upgrade their language using language of recommendation. The key is to get them talking, designing, creating something and then you can monitor and listen for errors.

Calling ELT gurus!! Let me tell me about some tasks that work! What you need to do is to think of goal-oriented activities where you are getting the students talking for a reason and to achieve some kind of goal. So, now I’ll stop rabbiting on and tell you what I need to tell you!

Here are some examples; getting students to design something; e.g. a restaurant, a bar etc and they need to think of specific areas; types of food, special offers, decoration, location etc. Get students making a leaflet of the best tapas bar in Seville and then upgrade their language using language of recommendation. The key is to get them talking, designing, creating something and then you can monitor and listen for errors.

WHAT IS YOUR ROLE DURING A TBL LESSON?

This is simple. Your role is to diagnose the linguistic problems the students are having and deal with these. To be able to do this you need to set up the task clearly so the students know what to do and you don’t waste time re-explaining. One needs to be efficient with their time and spend it listening and writing down the errors to then correct afterwards. I feel immediate correction works well as it’s fresh in their memories, the context is clear and therefore correction can be done efficiently and the upgrading process starts straight away.

WHAT´S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRO-ACTIVE AND REACTIVE CORRECTION?

So, in a TBL lesson one needs to write a model to show students what you expect them to do at the first stage which is called the pre-task stage. This needs to be dealt with like a mini receptive skills class, where the students have clear reasons to listen or read and to get the overall comprehension of the text. If you write this model quite naturally then when you re-read it you should find useful phrases quite easily, then these could then be exploited later on at the planning stage, which is when the students have a better go and for the teacher to start upgrading their language. These phrases need to be dealt with, mainly to check their understanding of their meaning. However, you could also go into the form; e.g. what part of speech follows the stem; for example I’m looking for + a noun and the pronunciation; intonation, sentence stress etc.

Once this has been done they can then produce a more naturally sounding piece of work and then it’s your role to improve this reactively, which means on-the-spot correction. This implies close monitoring and correcting them, this needs work as you need to bear in mind that you should look at all the students work so you need to be time efficient and try to correct everyone’s work.
So, the general idea is that by the end of the lesson the students have learnt new vocabulary, used useful chunks of language to express ideas and generally been improved in their linguistic ability.

Happy TBLing!!!!