Taking the lesson to task
Interested in making your lessons more task-based? Thinking of doing a task-based lesson on your Dip TESOL or DELTA course?
Task-based lessons are a great way to ensure there is genuine communication and a real focus on meaningful interaction in your lessons.
Read on to get ideas for “tasking up” your lessons.
Last month I was at a lesson jam and I shared my dance craze lesson idea. The teachers I spoke to gave me very constructive feedback on my ideas and they also had some really good questions about the lesson. This got me thinking about the parts of the procedure and rationale that I hadn´t included in the original post I wrote.
Since the jam, I’ve used the lesson with a B1+ multilingual online group so I thought it would be a good idea to do a follow up post delving a little more into the nitty gritty of the what and why of the lesson as well as sharing how things actually went down in class.
Be warned, it´s a long post. Much longer than the original lesson idea post. But that´s the thing about talking about teaching, isn´t it. Once you get me started……..
What kind of lesson is it?
So, one thing to put out there before I get near the questions the jammers had is that this is a kind of task-based lesson. I know it wasn´t labelled explicitly as such in the original lesson post but I hate being prescriptive about things like that. Nonetheless, we´re here now getting into the finer details so it´s important to mention and also probably helpful to explain a little what that means.
What’s task-based language teaching (TBLT) ?
TBLT is a form of teaching that emerged in the 80´s. It sits very firmly in the communicative language teaching tradition but it also emerged as a reaction to the dissatisfaction some had with the synthetic nature of PPP, which was fairly dominant at the time.
In terms of origin stories, it’s often accredited to an educator called Prabhu in Bangalore who stopped teaching his secondary level students grammar in the typical PPP way and instead started getting them doing text-based tasks individually-things like working out how to get to New Delhi by studying the train timetables and other published literature in English. He would then focus on language points after they had completed the task.
This project caught the attention of lots of people, including Jane and Dave Willis who went on to become two of the leading names in the area of TBLT. The Willises made a lot of adjustments to Prabhu’s version, most significantly making students do the tasks in pairs or groups rather than on their own. They´re still two of the biggest names to have been involved TBLT and their writings are a great place to start if you´re keen to know more.
Skipping forward almost 40 years, there have been a swathe of more and often very vocal proponents of TBLT with Rod Ellis, Peter Skehan and Mike Long being amongst the most renowned names. As is often the case with these things, each has their own take on what TBL means and how to do it in class.
I´m going to hold me hands up and say I don´t subscribe exclusively to any one of them but have borrowed and (as all good teachers do) stolen what I like from each to create something that works and makes sense for me.
What is a task ?
Task-based teaching is about getting students doing things in English (or whatever language you´re teaching). Things they are interested in, things that are engaging, and often things that are related to or mimic things we do in the real-world.
These things are called tasks and might include things like, putting a list of city problems in order of seriousness, deciding on a famous person to give a talk at their school, finding out who’s secondary school is the strictest, recommending a place to visit in their home country, sharing a story of something amazing that happened to them.
When it comes to designing tasks and planning task-based lessons, I´m a fan of the Willises questions that help us evaluate how tasky our tasks are. The expansion on the right are some add ons I use to make the questions easier to interpret and apply to my lessons.
Fig 1 How “tasky” are your tasks? Willis, 2008
How do you stage a task-based lesson?
In fig 2 below you can see a general framework for task-based lessons. This is my own version and is something of a mish-mash of elements from the different varieties of TBLT that exist out there today.
There are 4 main stages with each involving some or all of the many sub-stages mentioned in the middle column.
You can also see how the stages of my dance craze lesson relate to the framework in the third column.
Fig 2 Framework for TBL lessons
So, back to the jam.
Many teachers I´ve worked with over the years have a certain amount of fear and trepidation about doing a task-based lesson. Indeed, once I had told my fellow lesson jam teachers that this was a task-based lesson, the questions started to come thick and fast:
How will I know what language will come up?
How will I know what language to work on in the classroom if I haven’t chosen the target language before the lesson?
How exactly do I deal with it?
How do you practice the emerging target language?
Let’s take them one at a time...
1. How do I know what language will come up?
The short answer is, sometimes you just don’t.
In some TBL lessons, like mine, the language focus for the lesson hasn´t been pre-selected in any way by the teacher. In these lessons, instead you work entirely with emergent or emerging language. Emerging language is something that you can have in any kind of lesson, not just task-based ones. It´s the unplanned stuff, the language that comes up, the words or grammar the learners are looking for when they are trying to express themselves, the stuff you give them so they can say what they want to say better, more accurately, more naturally.
The long answer is, even if you want to take the deep-end approach of not planning any language focus (as I did in my lesson), with a few nifty planning tricks, you can still predict and prepare yourself for what might come up.
One of the best of these is something called “Try before you buy”. This is an idea from Nicola Meldrum and as the name suggests, it’s about trying out the communicative task before you bring it into the classroom. You could do it yourself or get a friend or a colleague to do it for you (or with you if it’s a collaborative task). Ideally, you want a recording of this so that you can listen back to it. Even better if you have a couple of people trying it out as the more data you get the better prepared you’ll be.
Once you have the recording(s), you need to listen back to it and as you do, make notes on what kind language you hear. This might involve listening three, four or five times and you might notice grammar, some lexical chunks or functional phrases.
What happened in my lesson?
A few days before the lesson I sent some family members the list of dance crazes and asked them to do the research and send me back a 1 minute whatsapp audio sharing what they’d learned.
From the recordings I got, I noticed that the passive voice was coming up a lot to talk about the origins of the craze. It was first performed by…… It was made famous by…... It was invented by…. It was included in…. It was revived in…..
I also noticed there was a small set of multi-word verbs that my family and friends kept using. I looked into…..I found out that…….I came across an article….. When I checked it out I found….
As my class are B1+ I thought both of these would be great things to possibly focus on. If the learners needed them!
Although I had a couple of recordings, I decided I didn´t want to use an authentic model in this lesson as I preferred to approach the task more “deep-end” and see what learners would come up with themselves and then help them with the issues and gaps they had. Not using a recording also meant I had more time to allow students to do the task again, and again- to gain fluency, accuracy and complexity with it.
What else could you do?
I took an open-ended approach to the language focus in this lesson and I was happy to help the students with whatever language they might need but it´s also possible to take a different approach and design the task more carefully so it makes students try to use certain grammar structures or lexical items. Taking this approach, the first time they attempt the task becomes a kind diagnostic tool for the language point you want to teach.
Whatever approach you take to the task design, the great thing about getting a good recording or two is you can use them in the lesson as authentic models for the learners to study and learn from. After their first attempt at the task, you could use the recording and transcript to focus on language features in the text.
A simple procedure for using an authentic model might be
Watch / listen and get students to process the text for meaning. General comprehension questions are a good way to do this.
Watch / listen / read (the transcript) and focus on the language in the text. This could be through a simple gap-fill of the transcript for example, or by writing up some gapped sentences from the text on the board.
Go over the meaning, form and pronunciation with the learners and check understanding.
2. How will I know what language to work on in the classroom if I haven’t chosen the target language before the lesson?
You´ll do it reactively. You will be trying to notice the area or areas students are struggling with and you will help them with that emerging language.
To be able to pick up on emerging target language (as I like to call it) you need to listen carefully and actively to the message the students are trying to convey whenever they are speaking- whether that be to you or each other.
There´s no denying that monitoring in an online lesson is not quite the job it used to be in the face-to-face classroom, but it´s still possible once you fine-tune those break-out to break-out room hopping skills!
To help give quality feedback on output, when working online with tasks, I find a preparation stage before speaking is useful. Building in preparation time where students write ideas or make notes for speaking (on a google doc in my lesson) means you can monitor their output and give meaningful feedback thus supporting them individually at the point of need.
Of course, you´ll still also need to have a good go at picking up some emerging language from their spoken output too but it means a little less pressure on that challenging breakout room monitoring.
What did I do?
In this lesson, I got students researching and making notes about their dance crazes on a google doc. I gave them 10 minutes to research and make their notes and I scanned up and down the document as they prepared and helped shape what they were saying by giving feedback on errors and suggesting ways to upgrade their output. Because they were so absorbed in their own preparation I didn’t worry they would be looking at other’s notes or idea.
Then I gave them 15 minutes in groups of 3 or 4 to give a mini-presentation to share their research. I had 14 students in the class so 4 groups and 3 minutes per speaker plus buffer time. I managed to get to each breakout room for about 3 minutes so I got to hear 5 or 6 students in total.
The most prominent issue I noticed at this sharing stage was with pronunciation especially of ed verb endings . There were also some issues with discourse organisers, but more on this below. Oh and there was also some really nice and effective use of some of multi-word verbs and other useful verbs , phrases like "I found out that….” “I looked up……” “I checked….”.
Together these three areas, pronunciation of ed endings, discourse organisers and multi-word verbs had just become my emergent target language areas.
What else could you do?
If you had the time, or were doing the task or preparation asynchronously, you could also ask the students to send you video or audio of their talk before they shared it with their group and that way you could give feedback on pronunciation and features of spoken discourse as well as grammar and lexis.
3. How do I deal with the emerging language ?
All emerging language is not born equally. Something I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t possibly deal with all the emerging language that happens in a lesson and you certainly can´t deal with it all in the same way. Some emerging language (EL) is just for one student, some for a pair or a group and some is for the whole class. The more you deal with EL, the better you´ll get at knowing the difference!
Dealing successfully and effectively with EL is also about having a set of adaptable techniques in your teaching tool-kit that you can use. These include simple things like writing it on the board as well as more complicated things like exploring it in greater depth with the group and looking at it´s meaning, pronunciation and form, much as you would look at planned target language and then hopefully being able to feed it forward to the next stage of the lesson. This feeding forward is really important as it increases the likelihood of uptake happening.
What did I do?
Well I could be here all day answering that and I fear I´m only holding your attention by a very thin thread! So, for the sake of brevity, and getting this post finished and published before midnight, here´s a good example of something I did that works well and is easy to implement:
While monitoring I noticed several of the students were saying things like Speaking of history, Speaking of people etc to move from one part of their dance-craze presentation to the next. At the same time I noticed other students were not using any signposting language to move from part to part in their summaries.
In feedback with the whole class I wrote on my feedback google doc (which I screen share with everyone). It looked a bit like this.
I then did a little drilling with it, elicited some more examples of nouns to pop in the phrase frame and then moved on to the next item to focus on.
What else could you do?
In this lesson I ended up just supplying them with the lexical chunks they needed to express their ideas more naturally but if you think the learners know the phrases but just aren´t using them you can also elicit them, maybe using a gap-fill on the board.
Certainly, next time we do a speaking task where this phrase in terms of X would be useful, and learners avoid it or use Speaking of again, I will board I_ t____ o_ food/ going out/ museums and see if I can elicit the phrase from them.
4. How do you practise emerging language? I won´t have time to make controlled practice exercises in the lesson, will I?!
Well you might have time to come up with a controlled practice activity if you used a low or zero-prep exercise, but I don´t really have time to go into those here! (something for the next post maybe?)
Instead, let´s focus on a really easy way to ensure there is always practice or feeding forward of emerging language: task repetition.
Task repetition is simple, requires no preparation of extra practice activities and is really generative as you can do it several times to get as much practice happening as possible. All you need to do is make sure some conditions of the task change eg change partners, change the topic (learners research a new craze) change the amount of time learners have to do the task- here Paul Nation´s idea of 4-3-2 or even the reverse 2-3-4 are really useful.
It’s also good to build in individual rehearsal and internalisation stages once you’ve fed in or focussed on a bit of language. You may not be using traditional controlled practice tasks but students still need time to process the new language, play around with it and check they can use it accurately before being expected to pull it out during a fluency-focussed task.
What did I do?
Task first time: Students did the task- they prepared, rehearsed and then shared in small groups
Language focus: We briefly looked at the passive voice in some fixed phrases like It was developed/ performed/invented but I didn’t delve very deeply into the grammatical form as I wanted to take a more lexical approach and encourage them to remember the chunks, especially focussing on the pronunciation of weak forms in was and ed in the past participle regular verb endings.
We also looked at some discourse organisers for introducing new topics like in terms of, history-wise, etc
Finally, I wrote up some good examples of phrases using multi-word verbs that I heard and praised the students who used them.
Task-preparation: Students had a few minutes to choose phrases from the language focus that they wanted to incorporate into their summaries. They turned off their mic and camera and I encouraged them to sub-vocalise the new phrases as well as rehearse their upgraded summary. I told them to use the chat box or turn on their mic and camera and ask me if they wanted to check their pronunciation at all.
Task repetition (second time doing the task): Students changed groups and repeated the task
Language focus: Now I had the emerging target language focus I did some error correction on things I had heard related to it and I pointed out some good examples of it I had heard too. We also looked at a few nice phrases some of the students were using or trying to use and I encouraged them to incorporate these in their summaries in the next stage- i.e. their third attempt at the task.
Task-rehearsal: I gave students a couple of minutes to re-prepare their summaries as previous.
Task-repetition (third time doing the task): Students changed groups and repeated the task for the final time
Task wrap up: I brought everyone back from the breakout rooms and they shared their favourite dance crazes as a class.
Reflection: In small groups students shared 3 things they had learned about grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation in the lesson.
What else could you do?
If you don’t have time for a lot of repetitions of the task in class time, you could give them a follow up task for homework which would act as a final “repetition” eg Make a short video about their dance and share it on flipgrid.
Final thoughts and further resources for dealing with emergent language and exploring task-based teaching and learning
Like many teachers, dealing with emerging language is a teaching skill that I’m constantly honing. I like to read and hear about what other teachers do with it and I find reading blogs and watching talks and webinars on emerging language a great way to develop.
As a teacher trainer, I also get to learn from the teachers I observe. If you have the chance to observe peers or colleagues who like to deal with it, this can be an excellent way to develop your repertoire of techniques too.
In the more long-term, if you’re thinking about getting a further ELT qualification and decide on the Dip TESOL, you can focus on emerging language in your unit 2 projects and really explore it there!
For more food for thought and tips, tricks and techniques to help you fill your emergent language tool-box look at these
Danny Norrington-Davies does lots of great stuff on emerging language.
This post by Melissa Lamb and Richard Chinn is another good place to read some more ideas.
For more ideas for task-based lesson ideas
Neil Anderson and Neil Mc Cutcheon‘s website Fluency First ELT is chock full of great task-based lesson ideas.
For more on the theory behind TBLT there are lots of task-based teaching podcasts from Learn your English like
Marije Michel has lots of insightful and practical ideas as well as some great discussion of the theory
Jane Willis gives a great historical overview of TBLT as well as lots of insights from 4 decades of practice at it
Neil Mc Millan, a TBL advocate, talks about TBL myths and how to implement tasks from course books
And for those interested in doing a Trinity Dip TESOL this is a really great article from a teacher on his Dip who did TBLT for his Developmental Project.
