Skehan's Task-based Instruction (2003):
After being aware of what the subject of our readings were, I felt ready to jump into Skehan's article and become more aware of task-based instruction. However, I felt quite overwhelmed and difficulty in what exactly I was suppose to be getting out of this. The beginning gave us a real 'quick & dirty' look into the history of how 'task' came to be, with its' roots coming from the term communicative activity. I felt the use of task-based is still unclear a bit to me. However, I was able to understand his approaches from a vary vague standpoint.
The psychological approach of interacting among language students offered certain assessment techniques like feedback. Students would be able to perform a task, while then receiving insight and support on how they are doing with the target level, knowing how they are comparing with the goals and expectations of the language class.
The sociocultural approach looks into how learners co-construct meaning while interacting. Van Lier and Matsuo (2000) discussed whether discussion tasks were symmetrical and collaborative among all the learners in their study. The results showed clear differences with learners. I feel that it is hard to say if discussion tasks are useful and beneficial for every party. There is the chance that a student might dominate the conversation over another, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the dominated one isn't learning. Students' minds work differently. As much as we want to keep our students busy with communicative language techniques and activities, it isn't always going to work with all students.
Skehan gave us a very well-developed article, but I still feel that there was maybe just too much going on in the article, and that he could have taken a more in-depth look into certain approaches, instead of us digesting it all. Maybe I just wasn't able to wrap my head around it all, but thank goodness we will be discussing this tomorrow!
Anthology Section 5: Chapter 9
Right after starting this chapter, I became very interested in direct approach to teaching language (Dornyei & Thurrell, 1994). The approach explicitly instructs learners in specific microskills, strategies, and processes involved in conversation. The project Beglar and Hunt designed was a 12-week student-generated action research plan, which required a whole semester to complete. The project provided the learners the opportunity to use their English for authentic purposes, allowed them to enhance their presentation skills, and to further enhance their own education and development (to name a few objectives).
I feel that this program offered a lot of choices and benefits for the students. They had freedom to choose a topic to investigate, and were guided by the instructors so that they would be able to stay on-task and make progress throughout the project. The different methods/strategies employed by the authors (ie. negotiation of meaning, communicative strategies, etc.) allowed students to become active in their groups so that everyone had a role in the project throughout the process. For the most part, I thought the authors did a great job, not saying that it was perfect (curriculum development is never-ending), but I felt that they did a nice job of encouraging the learners by playing the strengths and finding the interests of them, which in turn makes the learners feel that the instructors do care about them.
#getyourhandsdirty
Blogfully yours,
Tom The TESOL BRO
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