Hi Whizzes! 

Welcome to part 5 of our six part series on the Six Principles of Language Acquisition! Here we go! 

PRINCIPLE 5 

Tasks Should Form The Backbone of the Communicative Curriculum

Much of this is taken from While We're On The Topic, BVP on Language, Acquisition, and Classroom Practice. Highly Recommend!!!

The Nature of Tasks

The following exercise comes from a college-level textbook that claims to have a communicative approach:

 Restate the question using inversion:

1. Est-ce que vous parlez espagnol?

This activity comes from another college-level textbook claiming the same thing:

 Interview your partner and find out what she did last night. 

Most contemporary textbooks are full of "activities" like these, and yet, they are not communicative at all, or, at best, are partially so. 

In a classroom setting, everything must either be a task or lead to a task, and all such phenomena must promote authentic communication. So, back to Principle 1:

Communication is the expression, interpretation, and sometimes negotiation of meaning in a given context. Communication is also purposeful. 

If a facilitator is not engaged in the above, what is happening is not communicative. But, now comes the purpose bit. What's a communicative purpose? People generally use language for one or both of the following purposes:

•  Psychosocial: to establish and maintain relationships.
•  Cognitive-informational: to learn, confirm, explain something about other people and the world. 

And, sometimes, to entertain, although indeed I posit that the entertainment factor must involve both of the above purposes, to be successful.  

In the first example from the "communicative textbook", the purpose is not communication, but to practice making questions using inversion.

In the second, it is most likely to practice the past tense. It is trying to mask as a communicative activity, and failing to do so. 

epic fail. 

dirge.

Just because mouths are moving in a classroom doesn't mean that students and teachers are engaged in any kind of communicative event. 

And this is the problem when neither administrators nor educators know what they are doing, World Language Department-wise, of course. Administrators walk in and if they hear SOUND in the Target Language, they walk out happy, patting themselves on the back that they have a top-notch program going. Right. 

TASKS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

•  Tasks involve the expression and interpretation of meaning. 
•  Tasks have a purpose that is NOT language practice. 

When I was finally exposed to all this research, I, with the help of my colleagues in the department, crafted a schedule (a world, really) based on solid tasks for our middle school students. I would feel comfortable using this curriculum from 5th grade all the way to older adults. It consists of:

•  Warm Up Circle
•  Talks
•  Story Cycle
•  Bonus Tasks and/or Short Bonus Tasks

And, out of class, the ERP (Extensive Reading Program) and Discussions

Warm Up Circle

Purpose: to master songs, tongue-twisters, poems, verbs with motions, jokes, etc, that belong to Latin American and Spanish culture worldwide. 

Talks

Purpose: To communicate about fundamental aspects of their human life: weekends, hobbies, books, politics, food, both in a conversational manner and presentational manner. 

Story Cycle

Purpose: To fully inhabit, master, know, enjoy, embody, communicate about a story (and its characters) written right above learner level. To do so by completing pre-reading, reading and post-reading tasks. 

Bonus Tasks

Purpose: To master playing essential communication-based games. 

ERP

Purpose: To develop a life-long reading habit in the target language

Discussions

Purpose: to graduate with a robust knowledge of the mechanics of language acquisition, and with tools to navigate non-research-based programs in the future and take one's own language acquisition journey into one's own hands. 

I will delve much deeper into these these phenomena in future Blogs, but suffice it to say that there is a psychosocial and cognitive-informational purpose to all the above-stated phenomena that is NOT LANGUAGE PRACTICE. It's essentially trying to bring the fundamental aspects of native-language acquisition or immersion-based acquisition into an environment that is neither of the two, and doing so successfully.  

Constanza Ontaneda

your own personal Language Acquisition Witch

My question today is: 

What, to date, has been your favorite Task in a language-learning environment? Why?