English 345: Tuesday, September 20

Just what is a task? That question continues to pop into my mind despite having read numerous articles about task-based instruction. If one is simply researching a “task,” these “activities” may be short (and easily observable). If one is using these tasks as a teaching method, they may be longer, perhaps a few days or an entire unit long.  

Or not.

And therein, situated neatly in that “or not,” lies my confusion. Just what really constitutes a task? Does it always take into account some sort of form as well as the meaning of language? But then what is this balance of form versus meaning within those tasks?  “Opportunities for production [of language] may force students to pay close attention to form and to the relationship between form and mean,” write Beglar and Hunt in the anthology (97). Ok, that seems to make sense… so task-based language teaching utilizes both to help students become successful language learners.

 And yet, this very same anthology disappoints me as I read a few pages on:  “Second, and more worrisome, is the fact that no task-based program has been implemented and subjected to rigorous evaluation” (102). In seeming agreement with this anthology, Skehan’s article notes multiple areas of task-based research, but this research is often vitally different from the actual task-based instruction seen in the classrooms, especially the example in the Japanese school given found in the anthology: The focused task (likely meaning shorter and to the point) is more of interest to experimental researchers and testers while those tasks that take of up an entire class period are more of interest to teachers and non-experimental researchers. Skehan also writes that many tasks, as the critiques mention, are missing the “inevitable social dimension of language use’” (11).

So, as I continue to consider just what a task is, just how to implement it, just how long to implement it(and so on and so on), I begin to realize that I may not have the answers because, truly, no one has the answers—even those famous researchers getting paid to come up with those said “answers” for all of us. Surely this blog post doesn’t do anything to move scholarship forward—and I’m okay with that.  I was hoping that, as I wrote this post, I would have some sort of epiphany, and the answer (there’s that word again!) to my task questions would come to me.

One didn’t.

But I’m okay with that, too. Because, in nearly every case, we teachers will never really know the “right” answers to anything, anyways. We may have others giving us suggestions, but those, too, are simply suggestions. Sometimes, we just have to go against what all those famous researchers say and just do what feels right. Besides, we know our students better than those other guys do, anyways.

And if all else fails, we can give the students a task to do… if we can ever figure out what that really is.