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

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• 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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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

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METHOD

• Data analysis
• ACTIVITY COMPARISON Focus of analysis
• Aspects considered in the participants'
  classification.

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RESULTS
EXERCISES TASKS
input - Grammar-oriented activities - Diconnected with the students lives or real situations. - Meaning-oriented activities - Related to real-life, meaningful, current, relevant, and familiar topics.
goal - Structural practice - Language use, conversational practice. Tasks are seen as enabling the students to express their own opinions and background knowledge about a topic.
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EXERCISES TASKS
expected outcome - entail the repetition of the same structures along the activity. - are close-ended activities. - allow the use of different structures and vocabulary. - are open-ended activities.
control - manifest more language control on the students. - manifest less language control. Thus, more possible answers may increase the chances to enlarge the students' linguistic knowledge, and the teacher's possibility to engage students in conversation.
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EXERCISES TASKS
cognitive demand - require mechanical production and obvious sentence formation. - promote reflection and critical awareness on both language to be used (how to say) and the content to be discussed (what to say). In this sense, a task is seen to focus students' attention on both form and meaning simultaneously.
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Features considered in the participants exercises
context of situation - Presence of one or more interlocutors to whom the linguistic outcome is addressed. Design with group or pair work (e.g., One group discovers the false phrases of the other group.). - A purpose is established for the students interaction (e.g., idea of competition in game-like exercises).
realism - Grammar contextualization in text genres (e.g., dialogues, poems, letters). - Students immediate context or reality (e.g., familiar and famous people, sentences related to the students lives).
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Features considered in the participants exercises
relevance - more cognitive demand on the students, more reasoning on the targeted structures.
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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.

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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)

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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).

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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

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• 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.

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• b) Discuss, in groups, what you think about
  Lulas government.
• primary focus on meaning
• activity goal to express opinions about Lulas
  government.
• No final outcome. No communicative purpose.

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CONCLUSIONS (CONT...)

1. 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 teachers command of what the
   students are supposed to do with their exchanged
   input (e.g., classify, compare, reach a
   consensus).

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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.
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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.
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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 teachers
interpretation of the activity.
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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.
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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.