Week 1:

1. Definition of a pedagogic task

Pedagogic tasks are activities where:
- Meaning is primary
- There is some communicative problem to solve
- There is some sort of relationship with real-world activities
- The assessment of task is in terms of a task outcom
(Skehan, 1996)
2. Benefits of TBLT
Instruction is most effective when it is primarily meaning-based but is supplemented
by timely focus on language.
- Tasks can generate many opportunities for meaningful language use.
- Tasks can also provide a platform for language-focused based instruction (eg,
provision of corrective feedback)
 They can integrate a focus on meaning with a focus on language
According to researchers in general education (eg, John Dewey), education is more
beneficial if:
- It is student-centered.
- Students learn by doing rather learning about things they do.
Task-based approaches:
- Engage learners in activities that resemble what they will do in real-life using
the language.
- Are learner-centered, teachers are usually assigned a facilitating role.
Task can provide students with practice that is relevant to their academic,
occupational, vocational, or social survival purposes.
Need analysis is the best way to find out what tasks mioght be useful for and relevant
to a particular group of learners (Long, 2005, 2015)
3. Types of tasks
a. Target and pedagogic tasks
b. One-way and two-way tasks
c. Open and closed tasks
d. Convergent and divergent outcomes
e. Focused and unfocused tasks
f. Input-based and output-based tasks
Assigment 1: write an information sheet
Instruction: the information sheet should give a definition of what a task is and what
some potential benefits are of using tasks in L2 teaching. You should also include a
short description of what is meant by task-based and task-supported teaching, and
what might constitute some benefits/drawbacks of adopting either approach.
Week 2:
1. Reading as a cognitive activity
A simple view of reading: 2 components
- Word decoding
- General language comprehension (word recognization)

Eye movements in reading

Fixations: the eye is still, information is extracted
Saccades: the eyes move to the next point of fixation
Part of our aim: teach students to be able to decode the words in a text automatically,
in order to leave the cognative capacity for comprehension. (Ss read fast and fluently)
2. How does reading link to communicative language teaching?
3. Reading as a strategic activity
Skills:
- The processes that have been automatized, and which we don’t neef to pay
conscious attention to.
- ‘information processing techniques that are automatic, whether at the level of
recognizing grapheme-phoneme correspondence or summarizing a story’ (Paris,
Wasik, and Turner, 1991: 610)
Strategies: ‘actions selected deliberately to achieve particular goals’. (Paris, Wasik and
Tuner 1991:611)
- Skimming
- Scanning
- Guessing word meaning
4. Reading and background knowledge
Schema: ‘previous acquired knowledge structurs’ (Carrell and Eisterhold (1988:76))
‘related sets of knowledge linked together in an established frame’. (Grabe (2009:77))
Background knowledge can interfere with our understanding of the text.
5. Developing automaticity on reading fluency
It is essential to develop automaticity in word recognization, then the time is left for
understanding the meanings.
The bottom up skills of word recognition are absolutely crucial for our learners and
have to be developed, and have to be focused on.
Assignment 2: writing an action plan for improving the teaching of reading (250)
Requirements: all action points are relevant and appropriate; the action
points are likely to result in action; the rationale for all points is clear
and appropriate and is well expressed.
Week 3:
1. Principles for a communicative, task-based approach to teaching reading.
2 problems with intensive reading:
- We use it too much
- Teachers do it poorly
What we do in the classroom needs to mirror our behaviors outside the classroom.
Suggestion:
- Reading is a communicative act -> we must focus on the meaning of the test
- Fluent reading is fast and automatic -> help learners develop reading fluency
- We need some sort of authenticity of task, so that student can enjoy reading,
and they think it can contribute to their understanding of the world.
 What is the objective of our reading lesson and the objectives of the activities
are?
- Reading to learn the language
- Reading to learn something else
- Learning to read
Different teaching objectives require different tasks.
After go through the meaning of the text, we go through what the text means to
each of the readers in the classroom.
Take into account the reading that our learners already do -> our teaching of
reading needs to take into account this shift in literacy practices.
2. Teaching implications principles for teaching reading
Choosing interesting texts: first, choose what students are interested in, then choose
the topics which have high values in themselves
Making learners want to read the read: a pre-reading activity might focus on what
they know about a topic, then move to what they don’t know about it and what they
would like to know about it.
In general, part of the pre-reading activities is to provide learners the purpose of
reading.
Focusing on meaning: questions that help students understand the text should never
take the center stage.
Language can be learned better when it is focused on meaning and form.
Focusing on reactions: the first question teachers should ask after they finish reading
is, what their reations was, did they find anything surprising, was there anything they
didn’t know, did they like the people that were being described?
We react with the texts we read everytime.
If these questions are left in the end, they will tend to be squeezed or maybe even left
out completely, the message to the learner is that the reactions to the text don’t matter,
and what is really important is using the text for asking comprehension questions.
Offering choices to the learners: prepare a large quantity of materials for students to
choose.
- Creat a bank of materials with accompanying tasks and activities
- The act of choosing itself will involve them in reading
- Another way of offering choice is by colletcing electronic texts and websites
- This also means offering them the choice of not reading (extensive reading)
Provide a narrow reading: learners read a series of texts about the same topic
Production: the reduction of vocabulary, an increase in the speed.
Using electronic sources:
Presenting text and activities that learners can cope with:
- In extensive reading it’s best to get learners to read really easy material.
- In intensive reading, we also need to ensure that the the texts are pitched at a
level that is comfortable for the learners to read.
- Exersice types should, as far as possible, approximate to cognitive reality
(Williams 1986:44)
Extra reading:
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teachers/knowing-
subject/articles/making-reading-communicative
3. The three phase lesson
Pre: purpose
- Often focuses on vocabulary
- Raises awareness of the text and the topic
- Raises the interest of the learners in the topic
- Provides a purpose for reading the text
While: Purposes
- Understand the text
? Do they teach learners how to read, or do they test whether the learners have
understood?
By answering comprehension questions, the learners do not learn skills or strategies
that they can take and apply to the next text that they will read.
 We help learners read tomorrow’s text
Post:
- To consolidate or reflect upon what has been read
 - To relate the text to the learners’ own knowledge, interests, or views.
4. The three phase lesson in practice
- Jigsaw reading
5. Textual input enhancement
Highlighting certeain aspects of the input or text by means of typographical devices
such as:
- Bold-facing
- Underlining
- Italiscising
Eg: the learners forget to write ed in their writing, the t can decide to typographically
all past ed markers in their reading materials.
Textual input enhancement is an implicit form of textural modification, because it
intends to draw learner attention to language unobtrusively.
The aim is meaning-based, the Ss still focus on meaning overally
Steps to design:

Make sure to make a task while reading

Do not provide metalinguistic explanation, if you do, Ss will fail to focus on meaning,
they will end up focusing on form.
Additional guideline:
- Choose the text that is appropriate for the learners
- If the target structure is difficult, make the task simple
- Input enhancement is more likely to be effective when learners have prior
knowledge of the form
Textual input enhancement is not equally effective for different types of linguistic
features
6. The role of incidental learning in second language teaching
Week 4:
1. Pre-teach vocabulary
Pre-teaching vocabulary can be useful if it involves rich instruction of frequent
vocabulary items.
Rich instruction: involves several meetings with the words,
- focuses on many aspects of what is involved in knowing a word including
fluency of access to the word,
- and meeting the word in several sentence contexts,
- and gets the learner actively involved in processing the word.
Rich instruction activities should encourage learners:
- To make an effort to understand and process the forms and meanings of the
word.
- To look at various components of word knowledge.
Deeper processing of words increases retention rate.
Eg: Ss examine the written and spoken form of the word, considering synonyms of the
words, and discussing how the word behaves in the sentence, formally or informally
used
Rich instruction should focus on high-frequency items
2. Glosses: provide information about linguistic items in the text, typically in the
margin of the reading passage.
Involvement load hypothesis (laufer & Hulstijn, 2001)
- The more involvement tasks induce on the part of learners, the more likely it is,
that learners will remember new vocabulary.
Components of task-induced involvement:
- Need: learners’ motivation to learn the language
- Search: learners’ attempt to find the meaning of an unfamiliar word when the
meaning is not available. Stratregies: guessing, consulting a dictionary, asking
the teacher for help.
- Evaluation: comparing the words with other words, one meaning of the word
with other meanings and evaluating whether a word fits into a certain context.
 The involvement load hypothesis predicts the more involved learners are, the
more likely they will learn.
 Vocabulary acquisition seems to be facilitated more when learners are
encouraged to engage in deeper processing of the word.
3. Textual input enhancement
Rich instruction
Week 6: designing a reading task
1. Finding suitable texts
‘In the absence of interesting texts, very little is possible’ (Williams 1986:42)
How to find interesting texts:
- Diffuse process: through encountering text in your daily life, and you think that
yes, this text is interesting and I can use it in my class.
- Foucused process: looking for a text for a specific topic
The problem: the texts often require a lot of background knowledge
Try to find different angle of a topic
Some authentic materials are complex and advance, even for upper intermediate or
advanced classes. They may need shortening, or simplified
2. Designing suitables tasks for texts
Activities:
Have different texts about one topic, such texts are suitable for narrow reading
Narrow reading: help Ss develop vocabulary and fluency in reading
Issues: find the texts that are different enough from each other to justify the process
to the learner.
Example: 2 articles about the same event, but they have contradicted opinions.
Educational thing: article doesn’t always tell the truth. -> read the first article, then
disscuss the Ss reaction, then present to learners the second, third text, and contract the
Ss a task that will help them see the differences between two texts.
Activity: jigsaw reading
Activity:
Different analyses of the same situation are often really useful for class
Text about teenage drinking, this text presents a large numbers of dangers of teenage
drinking and how to prevent it. The opinions of teachers, head teachers, psychologists,
criminologists.
Oral role play task: Ss can be asked to present the view of different interviewees in the
text
Activity: texts including interesting angle of a text, or a surprising point of view
Eg: the problems gifted children and their parents may face when they go to school
 Ask who is the learner agree with?
Experienced task designers explore different possibilities with the text until they
find the right way to approach it.
 3. Adapting reading tasks
Change the exercises in the textbook into a more task-line task
A text
- Ask the learner whether they were surprised by any of the findings. This could
be discussed immediately after reading the text as a first reaction.
- Turn the discussion questions under further discussion into tasks. Learners may
be asked to create an action plan to do something.
-

- Asks different opinions of the Ss in the class, the Ss collect the in4 and present
in the form of a graph. Write a few paragraph for an international report on this
issue. Do a short ppt to present on the topic
A text about supertitions
- Asks the class to conduct a survey, and findout howmany of them believe in
these supertitions
- Asks the class to construct their own questionnaire about their own
superstitions, then carry out the survey and report on the findings

-
A text about hang gliding