Match the following tasks with the theories of learning.

Learning task	Theories of learning
1. Memorise the teacher’s examples 2. Clarify the message of the fable 3. Explain the character’s behaviour 4. Analyse the language samples and make up a rule of your own 5. Draw the material on the education system in the U.K. and write an essay 6. Listen to the teacher’s story and remember a similar episode from your own life 7. Find the grammar rule and learn it	A/ Behaviourism B/ Cognitivism C/ Mentalism D/ Nativism E/ Environmentalism

 

Teaching is organised with tasks for the learners. A task is an activity with an objective of fulfilment, procedures towards the objective and the outcome open for evaluation. A task can be text based(a text can be a dialogue, a monologue or just a sentence). Text-based teaching is organised along specific stages of the learning process: presentation, practiceand production This framework has become fairly popular and is widely known as the three-phase (PPP) frameworkused in teaching. Presentationof the material is presentation of the language to be learned in various ways. Practice can be based on drills in the form of the repetition, substitution or transformation form. Meaningful drills can employ guessing, imagination, elicitation from pictures and texts, open-ended discussions, making suggestions, drawing inferences. Production is demonstration of the knowledge(After Byrne, D. 1996. Teaching Oral English. Longman). An alternative to the text-based teaching is a task-based approach.Tasks can be closed(highly structured and controlled) andopen(loosely structured with a less specific outcome. They can include listing and mind-mapping, ordering and sorting, comparing and contrasting, problem solving, sharing personal experience, creative projects etc. (After Willis, J. 1996. A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Longman)

 

Exploratory task 1.6

Represent the following task as a task cycle and complete the right-hand column

Task	Task cycle
In this task you will have to fill in one word in each space. The missing words are all meaningful words essential for the topic under discussion. It is important to have a general understanding of the whole text first before you start the task.	Pre-task introduction:
Task performance:
Language focus:

 

Warming-up discussion