LANGUAGE TASKS AND EXERCISES: HOW DO TEACHERS PERCEIVE THEM? Rosely Perez Xavier, Ph.D.

1. LANGUAGE TASKS AND EXERCISES: • HOW DO TEACHERS PERCEIVE THEM? • Rosely Perez Xavier, Ph.D. • Federal University of Santa Catarina • rosely@ced.ufsc.br Florianópolis, Brazil

2. SOME DEFINITIONS • Exercises • are "activities that call for primarily form-focused language use." (ELLIS, 2003, p.3) • require a deliberate manipulation or practice of a linguistic feature by the learner (items of vocabulary, rules of grammar, semantic chunks). • involve both a linguistic purpose and an outcome intended to show how well the learner is able to display particular targeted forms. • promote language learning through an explicit and intentional process.

3. SOME DEFINITIONS • Tasks • are activities that call for primarily meaning-focused language use. (ELLIS, 2003; NUNAN, 1989; SKEHAN, 1998) • intend to engage learners in using the target language for a communicative purpose (e.g., to show understanding, to complete a form, to compare two pictures). • involve a defined outcome derived from some work done using language for comprehension and/or production. • promote language learning through an incidental or implicit process.

4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS • How do pre-service Brazilian teachers of English recognize exercises and tasks? • What aspects do they consider a task and an exercise to have when devising and analyzing them? • What is the scope of their misunderstanding?

5. METHOD • Participants • 20 pre-service Brazilian teachers of English as a foreign language. • They were attending the last year of an English teacher education program in a federal university in the south of Brazil • Most of them were in their twenties with little or no experience in English language teaching.

6. METHOD • Data collection • All the participants were asked to perform three tasks: • to devise an exercise and a communicative task; • to compare three different written activities; • to identify the exercise(s) and the task(s), and justify their answers.

7. ACTIVITIES Activity 1.Observe the garbage cans below and answer the questions in English. red garbage yellow garbage green garbage blue garbage can can can can 1. What’s the objective of these garbage cans? 2. What items are put in the red garbage cans? Give three examples. 3. What items are put in the yellow garbage cans? Give three examples. 4. What items are put in the green garbage cans? Give three examples. 5. What items are put in the blue garbage cans? Give three examples. www.t4tenglish.ufsc.br

8. Activity 2 Great! - Book 2 Susan Holden e Renata L. Cardoso MacMillan

9. Activity 3.Read the situations below and give your opinion about the people's attitudes. Are they sensible or insensible? Justify your answers. • For example:Mary is 15. Her boyfriend is 15, too. They decide to • marry. • They are not sensible because they are too young • to marry. • 1. George is 17. He is dating Kate. She is 16. George wants to make love with Kate, but she doesn't feel ready for sex. She says 'no'. He respects her decision. • 2. Paul is dating Juliet. They are 17 years old. He wants to make love with her. She says 'no'. He breaks up the relationship. • 3. David is dating Sandra, but he doesn't like her. He likes Beth. Sandra knows that. • (XAVIER, 1999)

10. METHOD Data analysis ACTIVITY DESIGN – Foci of analysis: • activity goal (linguistic or communicative), • type of meaning involved to achieve the outcome (semantic or pragmatic), • interactive elements (presence/absence of an interlocutor; context for the input), • elements of realism and relevance (topic proposed, cognitive demand), • elements of design (rubrics, example, input data)

11. METHOD • Data analysis • ACTIVITY COMPARISON – Focus of analysis: • Aspects considered in the participants' classification.

12. RESULTS

15. Features considered in the participants’ exercises

16. Features considered in the participants’ exercises

17. RESULTS (cont....) • Exercise and Task Design • Only 50% of the participants were able to build a written exercise. • Only 30% of them were able to build a written task.

18. RESULTS • Frequent exercise types: • Sentence or dialogue completion (30%) • Sentence or noun phrase formation (20%) • Frequent task types: • Group discussion (41,2%) with or without guiding questions • Role play (17,6%)

19. RESULTS What is lacking in some participants’ task design? • a defined outcome • E.g., A group discussion for the expression of opinions about a topic. • (1) primary focus on meaning; • (2) communicative goal or aim (Ellis, 2003); • (3) it lacks an outcome, a communication problem to be solved (Skehan, 1998).

20. CONCLUSIONS • A primary focus on meaning and a communicative goal are not alone enough to qualify a task. A defined outcome is expected to be achieved, otherwise a task can be interpreted as a conversational practice activity with no problem to be solved. • If this is true, the following activities might not be labeled as tasks:

21. Discuss, in groups, what you did on your last vacation. • primary focus on meaning; • activity goal: to give an account of what you did...; • No final outcome. No communicative purpose.

22. b) Discuss, in groups, what you think about Lula’s government. • primary focus on meaning; • activity goal: to express opinions about Lula’s government. • No final outcome. No communicative purpose.

23. CONCLUSIONS (CONT...) • A communicative purpose or a problem to be solved can be expressed in the written instructions of a task or established during its implementation. If it is defined only in the task implementation, then a non-task in its design may become a task in its implementation. This is the case of a meaning-focused activity with no outcome to be achieved that receives an on-line supplementation through the teacher’s command of what the students are supposed to do with their exchanged input (e.g., classify, compare, reach a consensus).

24. 3. The teacher's decisions in class may not converge with the written activity design, which means that the teacher may enhance or subvert the design of an activity. In this sense, the identity of a task/ exercise cannot be determined by its design necessarily. In other words, the instructions can signal a task or an exercise, but depending on its implementation one can change into another.

25. 4. Since the tasks were interpreted as a production activity, in particular a speaking activity that enables the students to mobilize their own linguistic resources to communicate their ideas, opinions, and feelings about relevant topics, it is possible to conclude that tasks, for the participants, seem to be more feasible to proficient learners of English, who are expected to better manage their linguistic and discursive knowledge in a communicative context.

26. 5. Tasks are perceived as an exercise when the teacher interprets the expected outcome as a salient linguistic product. This means that when the outcome involves the same linguistic pattern throughout the activity (e.g. lexical items that belong to the same semantic field, or the same syntactic pattern intended to answer certain questions), the teacher may subvert the task or detaskify it (SAMUDA 2005) imposing a linguistic purpose on the communicative content. In this sense, a focused task, for instance, might be interpreted as an exercise, and thus implemented as such. This would result in a perceptual mismatch (cf. KUMARAVADIVELU, 1994) between the task designer's intention and the teacher‘s interpretation of the activity.

27. 6. Traditional exercises are perceived as activities that need to be modernized, enhanced, upgraded, or task-like. In this sense, features that are particularly found in tasks are incorporated into the design of the exercises.

28. REFERENCES • ELLIS, Rod. Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford: OUP, 2003. • KUMARAVADIVELU, B. The Postmethod Condition: (E)merging Strategies for Second/ Foreign Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, v.28, n.1, p.27-48, 1994. • NUNAN, D. Designing tasks for the communicative classroom.Cambridge: CUP, 1989. • SAMUDA, Virginia. Leading from behind: a role for task design awareness. Paper presented in the Symposium: The role of the teacher in TBLT at the 1st International Conference on Task –Based Language Teaching, Leuven, Belgium, 2005. • SKEHAN, P. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford: OUP, 1998 • XAVIER, R.P. A aprendizagem em um programa temático de língua estrangeira (Inglês) baseado em tarefas em contextos de 5ª série do ensino fundamental. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, State University of Campinas, Brazil, 1999.