A TASK-BASED APPROACH TO ORAL WORK

In this article Peter Moor sets out to provide a working definition of what is meant by oral tasks, discusses what makes a task productive or useful for students and offers practical advice on how to make them work better in class. to the person next to you, whom you hardly know and like even less and talk about any damn thing that comes into your head while the teacher wanders around trying to look useful. Certainly students need to talk and will do this casually in the course of every lesson (one hopes in English) and in many cases in the coffee bar and outside the school. But in order for the students to obtain maximum benefit from oral activities, I believe that a more structured, task-based approach is useful. An oral task, according to my definition, is a spoken activity which leads to some kind of recognisable outcome or product. This might be in the form of a mini-talk to be given in front of the class, reporting back to the class on a group discussion which has led to some sort of decision or agreement, or recording a spoken activity onto video or audio tape. The danger of the kind of activity described above is that it enables the learner to coast along using the language they already know, even, on occasions, simplifying it in order to get the message across quickly. A task, on the other hand, should encourage learners to stretch themselves linguistically. What makes an oral task successful? (Note: a list of possible oral tasks is included at the end of this article. See Appendix 1) I believe a worthwhile oral task should have a number of characteristics:

Talk and Tasks Silence, as anyone who has ever watched a late-night horror film will know, tends to be a bit scary; for EL teachers it seems particularly so, as silence so often indicates confusion, a lack of interest or, perish the thought, inactivity on the part of our learners. After all, students repeatedly proclaim that they want to speak so it seems only fair that we give them maximum opportunities to do so. This has led to something of a keepem busy and, above all, keepem talking culture among ELT trainers and teachers, who have for so long regarded S.T.T. (Student Talking Time) as a good thing, and, conversely, T.T.T. (Teacher Talking Time) as a bad thing. As I remember one trainee teacher admonishing his students I wanna hear plenty on chatterin right?. Well, yes, we do want to hear plenty of chattering, certainly, but the main questions should surely be what is the point of this chattering and what should the students actually be chattering about? The danger is that student talk comes to be seen as good for its own sake the students are talking, the teacher isnt, so learning must be taking place, the thinking goes. In certain cases it may be true that just talking is enough, for example when learners have little or no opportunity to use English outside class, or are particularly reticent when they are in class. But there is a danger that we end up with the kind of activity which one writer has tartly described as turn

1. Intrinsic interest It should go without saying that an oral task should be something which is worth doing in itself. Of course, topics cannot be guaranteed to be of universal interest (as anyone who has tried to lead a heated debate on the topic of the environment will attest), but there are certain ones (personal anecdotes, favourite stories, discussions where there is a problem to be resolved, for example) which are tried and tested and seem to work well in most cases. Searching for gimmicky, different things for students to talk about can be counter-productive. Although it is desirable for oral tasks to reflect reallife language use where possible (as is the case with relating an anecdote, for example), it is worth noting that the real-lifeness does not itself guarantee interest: the familiar Solve the Murder role-play, found in Headway Upper Intermediate (and just about everywhere else it seems) is utterly unrealistic, but in my experience usually engages students, whereas doing a role-play in a shoe shop is (for learners in an English-speaking environment at least) more realistic, but can appear somewhat unengaging, unless they are particularly interested in shoes. 2. The existence of an outcome or end product As mentioned above, the task needs to have some kind of end product which the students work towards. The problem with much oral interaction (particularly conversations in pairs which the learners do not report back on) is that a few minutes after the conversation we cannot remember what was said, or how, or what (if anything) was decided. If the task is recorded, however, (in the class, the laboratory, or by the students themselves at home), or if it is

performed in public, there are two important implications. Firstly, students should be able to measure their progress more accurately, particularly if they have a learners cassette on which they record themselves speaking regularly. Students are often unaware of the progress they are making in their oral work because they cannot hear themselves. The achievement of specific oral tasks provides more objective proof of whether or not they are actually progressing. Secondly, using the language becomes more of an event. Although giving talks in front of the class or recording ones voice may prove to be too daunting for some, I have found that the gentle application of pressure can produce surprising results. Students may actually welcome this kind of pressure and respond positively to it; it may even be a feature of their own educational system. 3. Provision for language input Language input can come from a variety of sources at any point during the preparation stage as long as sufficient time is given over to it. As well as providing thinking time, preparation can involve asking the teacher about any language points which require clarification, rehearsing the task with a partner/the teacher or both (depending on time constraints), and receiving feedback which they can put into practice later. In this way language input might be obtained from a variety of sources, including the teacher, reference books and fellow students. Unlike the Solve the Murder role play mentioned before (which is clearly geared towards producing past modals of deduction), the oral task

should not, in my opinion, be freer practice of a particular grammatical point which the teacher presented earlier. In task-based learning the language is geared to the task rather than the task to the language, and the onus for providing language input comes much more from the learner. If we ask the student to, for example, give a short presentation to the class about their favourite hobby, the actual language they will need to do this is only partly predictable; certainly you can bank on phrases like Im keen on, or I spend a lot of time ing coming up, but many of the other items will be personal to the learner. Dong this task once with an Elementary class, two of the items the students needed to know were lace making and bonsai trees not items usually found in Elementary coursebooks, but words which were, nevertheless, important to these learners and consequently more easily retained and used by them. There should, however, be a balance between tasks of this type which are personalised, and those which require no personal input. 4. Opportunities for silence, spontaneous speech and prepared speech Students need silence in order to reflect on what they need to say and how they are going to say it. This brings us back to that fear of silence I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Teachers used to a constant hubbub of comforting conversation

may find recourse in the odd music tape here! Students will also feel less inhibited about asking questions if there is something to break the silence while they plan what they are going to say. Just as a successful communicator will rehearse what they are going to say when making an important phone call, or a successful writer produce various drafts of her work before reaching a final end product, so giving time to plan their speech should produce more ambitious language. Too often teachers assume that learners have instant access to their thoughts and ideas just a few moments to think before any speaking activity can make a lot of difference. Case Study: An Oral Task In Action To conclude, I would like to give a brief account of one task-based lesson which I have used, as this may help to clarify some of the points made earlier. The particular task I have chosen is simple, provides what I hope is a clear illustration of the task cycle in action and (in case teachers care to try it for themselves) provides about 90-120 minutes of lesson for a few minutes of preparation. The task itself is to Tell the story of a childhood memory and was done with a rather weak Early Intermediate multi-lingual group at IH London. The task cycle itself looks like this:

MODELMM MODEL

PLANNING/INPUT/ REHEARSAL

TASK

Model I gave the model myself based on one of my own childhood memories of falling off a bicycle, and how this helped my relationship with my class teacher. (Sorry, but further details are strictly between me and my Early Intermediate A class). Of course teachers could find some published material to fulfil the same aim, but it is less likely to be of real interest to their students. In planning and giving the model a few things are worth pointing out: i) I explained that I was going to tell them a story about my own childhood and that, later in the lesson, they would be asked to do something similar. This helped them to see the relevance of the story and to focus their attention on certain aspects of presentation. ii) I spent less time planning it than I would give to the students (no more than 5 minutes) and worked only from a piece of paper with brief notes and a few key words which I showed to the students. This helped convince them it wasnt necessary to plan every word. The talk should be no more than about 4 or 5 minutes. iii) The telling of the story should not be too slick or polished as this may intimidate students. On the other had, it should be interesting enough to hold their attention and spark ideas in their own minds. Planning/Input/Rehearsal On being told they will be asked to do something similar, students may often appear reluctant or daunted. I have found that patience and keeping a cool head can pay dividends here. Of course it may take time for the students to dredge up a childhood memory (or at least one that they are prepared to tell the others!) but nearly everybody comes up with something in the end. In order to structure their anecdote more I gave them the option of writing some key words on paper and suggested a way of organising the anecdote into five sections: a short statement of what the story will be about; an introduction to the characters, setting etc.; the main event; how it was resolved; and the moral 2. It was up to the students to decide whether or not to use this structure. I gave the students a maximum of 30 minutes to plan their anecdotes on reflection this was probably too long as some finished early. During this time they were free to ask me about how to say particular things or to check if things were right. Predictably, some students were very concerned with accuracy and wanted to check everything, while others wanted to get on with telling their story almost immediately. Dealing with the students questions can be quite taxing for the teacher; among questions I was asked by this particular class were: Can I say mudballs? (if you can have snowballs, why not!); How do I say when animal crosses road and car goes(sound effects: splat!)the cat was? (run over seemed to be the appropriate word here). As part of the rehearsal students were then able to try out their talk with a partner or me. The listener in each case was asked to provide feedback, particularly in pointing out aspects of the story which were unclear or confusing, rather than listen for individual errors. Task Once the half hour had elapsed it was time for the students to go public and give their talk to an audience. I chose on this occasion to have a number of students give their talk to the whole

class, rather than tell their stories in small groups, and then select the best, partly to see what effect this pressure would have on individuals. My entirely random selection of students meant that a learner I shall call Yumiko, who had seemed very shy in the first few lessons, was chosen to do the first talk. Despite much embarrassment and nervous giggling, she acquitted herself well, with a touching, if rather morbid, recollection about how the apparently constant premature deaths of her childhood pets led to her becoming a medical student. I was surprised by a number of points: i) In her diary Yumiko noted that When I spoke at front of class I felt stress, pressure. It was good experience for me. Here at least was one student who seemed to respond well to the gentle application of pressure. ii) Her language was far more ambitious than anything I had heard her produce previously (including the phrasal verb run over, the significance of which now became clear to me). iii) In a public situation this student was far more willing to reveal information which was quite personal to her, and did not freeze as one might have expected. Obviously, it would be wrong to read too much into what was one individual case, but this did bring home to me what seems to me to be some of the most important features of applying this model of task-based learning to oral work: Firstly, that if the learners are not coming up with ideas and language immediately, the teacher should not panic. Planning and reflection

time are crucial if learners are to produce a worthwhile end product, and too often I feel that I have not allowed them enough of this. Secondly, the product of a taskbased lesson will never be the same with two different classes. I have done the Childhood Memory Story with students (and trainees) in a variety of different contexts, and because the stories have never been the same, I have never got bored with it. Finally, students (particularly in the context of IH London) frequently complain about lack of challenge in lessons, which may be a response to the fact that when they are already familiar with the language that is being presented, they feel that they know it (whether or not they can use it correctly and appropriately!). With a task-based lesson it is up to the learner how challenging the lesson is, since it is she, rather than the teacher, who decides what she wants to say. That is probably worth several minutes of silence.

_____________________________________________________________________ Appendix 1 A list of oral tasks suitable for Intermediate level Interview and introduce a fellow student to the rest of the class Tell a story about a childhood memory Choose the best candidate for a job and prepare a short statement Make a radio programme, perhaps on a particular theme such as entertainment, reviews etc. Explain a list of social DOs and DONTs for visitors to your country Give a short talk about an object which is special to you, or something you would particularly like Tell a story to the class from a menu of possible sources (folk tales, personal anecdotes, rsum of a short story etc.) A radio phone-in where a panel of experts give advice to callers

Bibliography 1 The phrase used by Batstone, R in his talk Teachers Grammar and Learners Grammar: Bridging the Gap, given at IH Teachers Centre, March 1995 2 See McCarthy, M: Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, C.U.P 1991 Also of interest for anyone wishing to know more about task-based learning: Foster, P: Doing the task better: how planning time influences students performances chapter 12 in Willis, J & D (eds.): Challenge and Change in Language Teaching, Heinemann 1996 Willis, J: A Framework for Task-Based Leaning, Addison-Wesley Longman 1996