THE TASK

Nina Daskalovska
 OVERVIEW
1.1 The language-learning task. A definition and some features of good classroom
tasks.
1.2 Task evaluation. The features described in the previous section applied as
criteria for the evaluation of the effectiveness of different classroom tasks.
1.3 Organizing tasks. Aspects of the presentation and practical classroom
management of tasks.
1.4 Interest. Ideas on how to stimulate and maintain student interest in doing
tasks.
1.5 Homework. Different homework tasks and ways of checking them.

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1.1 The language-learning task
A task is defined as a learner activity that has two objectives:
 learning of some aspect of the language;
 an outcome that can be discussed or evaluated.

It could be a grammar exercise, a problem-solving activity or a writing

assignment.

A good task produces good learning: from the teacher’s point of view,
this is the major criterion for its evaluation.

Some underlying practical principles of task design that are conducive to

good learning are: validity, quantity, success-orientation, heterogeneity
and interest.
 Validity
The task should activate students primarily in the
language items or skills it is meant to teach or
practise. For example, oral fluency tasks based on
full-class discussions actually allow for very little
oral fluency practice by most of the class.
Discussions in pairs or small groups are likely to
provide far more speaking practice and are therefore
more valid.
Quantity
The more English the students actually engage with
during the activity, the more they are likely to learn.
So we need to make sure that if, for example, we are
practising a particular grammatical form, then
students engage with it
repeatedly in different contexts; or if we are doing an
activity aimed at improving
listening, then the students actually do a lot of
listening. And we should try to
activate as many students as possible simultaneously
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rather than one by one.
Success-orientation
We learn by doing things right. Students need plenty of
opportunities to perform successfully in order to
consolidate learning of the target item or communicative
skill. It is therefore important to select, design and
administer tasks in such a way that students are likely to
succeed in doing them most of the time.
Heterogeneity (of demand and level)
A good task is heterogeneous: it provides opportunities for
students to engage with it at all, or most, of the different levels
of proficiency within a class.
Interest
If the task is relatively easy, then there is a danger that the task
might be boring. And boredom leads to student inattention,
low motivation and ultimately less learning. An interesting
task includes: an interesting topic, the need to convey
meaningful information, a game-like ‘fun’ task, attention-
catching materials, appeal to students’ feelings or a challenge
to
their intellect or creativity.
1.2 Task evaluation
The principles presented in the previous section can serve as a useful set of criteria
for evaluating the effectiveness of classroom tasks such as those illustrated in the
scenarios below.

Task
Have a look at the scenarios 1-4, pp. 45-47. How effective do you think the
learning tasks are? How might you improve them?
 1.3 Organizing tasks
The success of a task in bringing
about learning and engaging students
depends not only on good initial task
design but also on how you actually
run it.
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It is worth thinking carefully about: -
the way you give instructions,
- provide ongoing support during the
task process and
- give feedback at the end.
 Instructions

Class attention Brevity

Everyone has to be listening when you are giving
instructions; otherwise students may do the task
wrong, or waste time consulting each other or getting
you to repeat yourself. This is particularly true if the
task involves getting into small groups or pairs.
Repetition
A repetition or added paraphrase of the instructions
may make all the difference. Also, it helps to present
the information again in a different mode.
Students have only a limited attention span. Make your
instruction as brief as you can. This means thinking fairly
carefully about what you can omit, as much as about what
you should include!
Examples
Very often an instruction only ‘comes together’ for an
audience when illustrated by an example. If it is an
exercise, do the first one or two items with the students. If
it is a communicative task, perform a ‘rehearsal’ with a
volunteer student or two, to show how it is done.

Checking understanding
It is not enough just to ask ‘Do you understand?’. It is useful to ask them to do something that
will show their understanding: to paraphrase in their own words or, if you have given the
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instruction in English, to translate into their L1.
 Ongoing support
One of the basic functions of a teacher is to help the
students succeed in doing the learning tasks: it
therefore makes sense to provide support in the
course of the task itself.
In a teacher-led interactive process, this involves
such things as:
• allowing plenty of time to think,
• making the answers easier through giving hints
and guiding questions,
• or confirming beginnings of responses in order to
encourage continuations.
In group or individual work, it means being ‘there’
for the students, available to answer questions or
provide help where needed.
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On the other hand, we also want to encourage students
to manage on their own, and not to be too teacher-
dependent.
So this means treading a narrow line between providing
help when students really could not do the task
successfully without it, and holding back or challenging
them when you know they could, with a bit more effort,
manage on their own.
In either case, it needs to be clear to the students
throughout that you are involved and aware of what is
going on.
 Feedback
It is important to provide a feedback stage whose
main aim is to ‘round off’ the task:
 by evaluating results,
 commenting on the work done and
 signalling an end to this activity as preparation for
moving on to the next one.
Showing appreciation for the results
Usually a task based on group and individual work
has a clear outcome which can be used as the basis
for a full-class feedback stage.
o If it is problem-solving, elicit and discuss the
solutions that different groups have come up with.
o If it is a brainstorming activity, pool their ideas on
the board.
o If it is discussion, comment on their suggestions
and ideas.
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Summarizing and evaluating
In some cases, there are no obvious final results you can
relate to in full class – for example, if you have been
doing a teacher-led exercise and providing feedback as it
was going on, or if the students have been doing writing
assignments which need to be checked individually.
However, even in such cases there is still a need
for a brief full-class feedback session.
This may review the main learning points which have
been the focus of the task, and may provide evaluative
comment: appreciation for the work accomplished,
mention of aspects that need further work or singling out
particular students for praise.
 Practical tips

1. Give instructions before materials. If you are doing group work based on particular task sheets or other
written or graphic materials, explain the task before you give out the materials. Otherwise students often start
looking at the materials and don’t listen to what you are explaining.
2. Tell them during the preliminary instructions how and when the task will end. Use the initial instructions to
prepare students for ending: give information about how much time they have (particularly if there is a strict
time limit), how you intend to stop them, and more or less how much you expect them to have achieved by the
end.
3. Give advance warning when you are going to stop group or individual work. Tell the class a few minutes
before ending how much time they have left to work – perhaps even twice: an advance ten-minute warning, and
then a final two- or three-minute one. This makes it much easier to stop them when the time comes, and
forestalls protests.
4. Have a reserve activity ready. Sometimes groups or pairs finish early. If you want other students to continue
work, then you need to be ready with something for the faster workers to do while the others are finishing: an
extension or variation of the original activity, reading, something from the
coursebook or a short further task.
1.4 Interest
Probably the best way to explore the reasons why some tasks arouse and maintain
student interest, and others don’t, is to try to analyse the differences in interest between
pairs of tasks that have similar teaching aims.

Action task
Try doing some or all of the pairs of tasks (1-4, pp. 51-54), together with
colleagues (‘peer teaching’). All the tasks will probably have useful
language-learning outcomes – none are really ‘bad’ tasks – but there are
differences from the point of view of interest.
Think about which of each pair was the more interesting to do and why .
 Summary

The main practical principles contributing to interest in the design of classroom tasks can be summarized as follows:

• Initiative: students initiate their own ideas in response to the task.

• Open-ending: students produce a number of different ideas, all of which may be ‘right’.
• Collaboration: students work together to produce a better result than they could have done on their own.
• Success: students succeed in achieving the task objective.
• Higher-order thinking: students are challenged to think about causes and effects, categories, connections,
priorities and so on, rather than just recalling or saying simple sentences.
• Personalization: students express their own experiences, opinions, tastes or feelings.
• Interpersonal communication: students interact with one another to share or discuss ideas.
• Game-like activity: students experience a feeling of playing a game, produced by the combination of a clear
and easily achieved objective, together with ‘rules’: constraints that limit how they can achieve it (a time limit
is one of the easiest to implement).
• Visual focus: students use a picture or other visual stimulus which functions as a basis for the task.

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1.5 Homework
Homework becomes an increasingly important factor in learning as students get
older and/or more advanced.
In younger beginner classes, most of the learning takes place in the classroom, and homework
is given to extend and reinforce what has been done there, or just to get students into the
routine of doing it.
Later, more substantial learning takes place out of the classroom: students might write essays;
or they might do projects using internet-based research; or they might read their own
simplified books.
Eventually, after students leave school, their continued learning of the language will depend
largely on their own ability to study outside the classroom: reading books or internet texts, for
example, or conversing with other English speakers.
So homework is not only a way to provide extra opportunities for language study outside the
lesson, but also an investment in the future, in that it fosters students’ ability to work on their
own as autonomous learners and to progress independently of the teacher.
TA S K
R E C A L L F R O M Y O U R O W N S C H O O L D AY S
O N E H O M E W O R K A S S I G N M E N T, O R T Y P E
O F A S S I G N M E N T, T H AT Y O U R E M E M B E R
A S B E I N G A WA S T E O F T I M E , A N D
A N O T H E R T H AT Y O U F E E L WA S
W O RT H W H I L E A N D L E A R N I N G - R I C H .
W H AT W E R E T H E FA C T O R S T H AT M A D E
THE DIFFERENCE?
 Types of homework tasks

Routine review Creative assignments

A lot of language learning depends on repetition for its
success, and homework is one way of ensuring that the
necessary review takes place. So use homework to get
students to re-read texts, to learn lists of lexical items or to
do grammar exercises.
Previews and preparation
Students can be asked to find out all they can
from the Internet about the subject of a text you intend to
work on with them, or to read through a new text and look
up words they did not know in a dictionary.
Give occasional assignments that demand some kind of
creative response which can be as simple as creating two or
three more similar questions to add to an exercise you have
already done; or suggesting multiple answers to a
‘brainstorming’ cue or suggesting alternative answers to
questions given in the book.
Preparing presentations
Students can be asked to prepare presentations to give in class.
Presentations can be as short as presenting a new lexical item
or three- or five-minute talks on a preselected topic, or as long
as full presentations of projects.

Projects
Projects are done largely at home, as a series of homework assignments, and can take varied forms. They could be research on
famous people or historical events; information about a topic, hobby or profession; metalinguistic work on aspects of the
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language itself.
 Giving feedback on homework tasks

Often teachers use the first part of the lesson to go through the homework students have just done, eliciting answers
from different members of the class, checking and correcting. The problem with this is that it is very time-
consuming: it substantially cuts down the amount of time you have for all the other things you want to get through in
a lesson.

• It is much more learning-productive for the students, and saving of lesson time, to take in notebooks and
check homework assignments at home.
• Alternative strategies are simply to provide the right answers, either written up on the board or
dictated by you so that students can self-check.
• Or give five minutes in the course of the lesson for students to check each other’s homework in small
groups, calling on you only if they have any questions.
• If homework has involved the preparation of presentations, then obviously these will need to be presented
in class; but the feedback can be given later, through email.

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 Practical tips

1. Take time to explain. Don’t just tell students briefly at the end of the lesson what the homework is: take time
during the lesson to explain what it involves, how it will be checked, what options there are, and to answer
any questions. Linked to this, it is important to . . .

2. Say why. Tell students why they are doing this homework assignment: its importance for learning, or its place
in the general programme of studies, or relevance to an upcoming exam.

3. Make homework a component of the grade. When allotting an end-of-term grade, include the regular
completion of homework assignments as a component: say, 10%. This encourages students to do their
homework and enables less proficient, but hardworking, students to raise their grade.

4. Limit homework by time rather than quantity. Tell students to spend 20 minutes (or whatever you think
appropriate) on Exercise D and do as much as they can, rather than just to ‘do Exercise D’. This means that
slower-working students will not have to take hours doing something that other students finished in a few
minutes: each will work according to his or her own speed and ability.
 Practical tips
5. Provide extras. Add extra, optional homework assignments that students may do if they finish the compulsory ones
early, or if they wish to do more. If students are encouraged to read simplified books or stories, then they can be told to
spend time getting on with these as the extra assignment.

6. Don’t worry too much about students ‘copying’ from one another . It is true that copying homework may mean that
one student is not learning anything, but it might also mean that one is helping the other, which may well promote
learning and therefore should not be condemned. And the alternative may be that the weaker student wouldn’t do it at all!
Encourage students to tell you if they worked together so that you know about it, but don’t ban it completely.

7. Use email or a Language Management System (LMS). If they have computers at home, send students their
homework, and get the completed assignments back, through email or through an LMS such as Moodle. Correcting and
commenting is also much easier and quicker this way than doing it on paper. Even if some students do not have
computers, using email with those who do will still save time.

8. Selective checking. If you have a large class and cannot possibly check all their homework every week, take in, say,
one-third of the class’s notebooks each week to check, and then the others in later weeks. Keep lists of when you check
each student so you do not find yourself neglecting some of them. If you are using an LMS, selective checking and
record-keeping is fairly simple.
 Review

The language-learning task

1. What are the two objectives of a ‘task’ as defined here?
2. What are the main characteristics of a good task? Can you recall all five of the ones listed in
this section?
3. What is a ‘heterogeneous’ task?

Task evaluation
4. Suggest two problems with a listening comprehension task based on an informative spoken
text followed by written multiple-choice questions .
5. What’s wrong with ‘Hangman’ as a spelling task ?

Organizing tasks
6. Give at least three good tips for making sure that task instructions are understood.
7. In what ways can a teacher provide ongoing support for students as they perform tasks.
8. Suggest some reasons for giving feedback at the end of a task, other than telling the students
if they have succeeded or not.

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 Review

Interest
9. What is ‘higher-order thinking’?
10. Can you recall at least four other features that are important when designing
interesting tasks ?

Homework
11. Suggest some reasons why it is important to give homework.
12. What are some problems for the teacher when providing feedback on homework?
And some possible solutions?

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