Читать книгу Task-based grammar teaching of English - Susanne Niemeier - Страница 17

In WILLIS’ framework, the task cycle ends with what she calls a ‘language focus’, separated into ‘analysis’ and ‘practice’. The analysis phase is supposed to focus on specific features of the task texts, whereas the practice phase is meant for practising new words, phrases and patterns. According to WILLIS/WILLIS (2007: 114), the language focus takes place “outside the context of a communicative activity”. Although this is the stage where newly introduced grammatical phenomena could be presented in a structured way, WILLIS does apparently not intend to use this part of the lesson as a systematic restructuring phase but instead suggests to practice vocabulary and phrases used during the lesson, to do pronunciation exercises and to work on problems which came up during the lesson. These ways of using the language focus are quite haphazard and unsystematic and transform the language focus into a mere appendix to the lesson, because it is not really connected to it, is furthermore uncommunicative and can probably also be regarded as superfluous if time problems arise.

The perspective on task-based language teaching taken by this book suggests instead that the language focus be re-evaluated and should become a very important part of the lesson, not just an optional add-on and, crucially, that it stays within the context of the communicative topic of the lesson, because the example sentences come from the students’ own reports on their task outcomes. In the language focus, the learners’ attention is explicitly drawn to the grammatical phenomenon in question and to how it works communicatively, i.e., both form and meaning are focused upon. Implicitly, the grammatical phenomenon in question has already been used during the pre-task (by the teacher) as well as during the task (by the learners) and the language focus then moves from the learners’ implicit exposure to the grammatical construction towards raising their explicit awareness of the newly introduced structure.

Grammar teaching cannot be effective when it is isolated from a meaningful usage context, the latter having been provided by the task. To help the learners to notice the structure, their own sentences or utterances from the reports can be taken as an illustration of the grammatical phenomenon in question, as the learners already made use of it during the task and during their reports. In the language focus, the phenomenon can then finally be structured and explained. This is preferably done in an inductive way, meaning that the learners themselves try to find out the meaning and form of the structure, which allows for deeper cognitive processing1.

To stick to the example of the plural –s, examples from the learners’ reports can be written on the right-hand side of the board (for instance, when the task consisted of preparing a healthy fruit salad for the class and writing a shopping list for this, the expressions on the board could be “5 apples” or “4 bananas”). Following this, the teacher writes the number 1 on the left-hand side of the board and asks for each fruit “and if I have only one of these, what do I say?” and the answers are then written on the board by those learners who gave them. When all slots are filled (three or four expressions should be enough in this case), the teacher asks the learners which differences they notice between the expressions on the left-hand side of the board and those on the right-hand side of the board. They will notice the extra morpheme, the ‘s’, which will then be underlined. However, this is only the explanation of the form, but the explanation of the meaning is equally important, namely that the plural morpheme means ‘more than one’. The learners can be asked to offer their own hypotheses on the meaning of the plural form, by answering the teacher’s questions about why they think the ‘s’ is added, and they will easily find an answer along the lines of ‘more form is more meaning’, a clear instance of iconicity in language. Other grammatical phenomena are of course not as easy to explain as the plural –s, these will be discussed in the second half of this book.

Furthermore, if enough time is available after the language focus, a post-task activity can be added in order to solidify the grammatical information provided during the language focus. In this case, a transfer to another word field, for example, siblings or animals (“who has a brother/sister?” – “how many brothers / sisters do you have?” or similar), is recommended. Should there not be enough time left during the lesson itself, the transfer can be done for homework.

Summing up, it should be kept in mind that the different phases of the task cycle focus on different aspects of the two learning targets, i.e., the communicative one and the grammatical one. Whereas the pre-task phase sets the stage for the communicative topic (such as talking about healthy eating habits) and already makes the learners subconsciously and passively familiar with the grammatical phenomenon (by the teacher’s use of pluralized nouns), the task itself stays within the communicative domain but demands the learners’ active use of the grammatical construction (such as the compilation of shopping lists and the potential election of the best fruit salad, judged by its ingredients) and the language focus acquaints the learners in a structured and inductive way with the form as well as with the meaning of the grammatical construction they already used during the task, ideally followed by a transfer to another word field or topic.

This procedure is in line with ROBINSON’s (2011: 14) idea that “pedagogic tasks should be sequenced solely on the basis of increases in their cognitive complexity”. In other words, in the suggested slightly modified2 task cycle the learners receive input that already contains the structure in question during the pre-task phase but normally do not yet use the targeted structure themselves, while during the task phase they should use the structure actively without reflecting on it and during the language focus and the post-task phase, i.e., the transfer, they are expected to pay explicit attention to the structure and its use. ROBINSON further recommends to

… increase resource-dispersing dimensions of task complexity first (to promote access to current interlanguage), then increase resource-directing dimensions of complexity (to promote development of new form-function mappings, and destabilize the current interlanguage system). (ROBINSON 2011: 15)

An access to the learners’ current interlanguage systems is provided by the communicative focus of the pre-task, during which the learners are involved in establishing the communicative lesson topic on the basis of their language and world knowledge. Only afterwards are they exposed step-by-step to the grammatical topic of the lesson in an inductive way. In an ideal case, this changes their interlanguage systems, into which they will start to integrate the newly acquired structure.