TASK-BASED APPROACH

Teaching oral communication skills in academic settings
A case study in Task-Based Approach to syllabus design

Mohammed K. Ahmed
International University of Japan

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Abstract

This paper describes the applications of the task-based approach to designing a syllabus for an oral communication skills course in an academic setting. It discusses the goals of the course within the relevant institutional contexts, outlines the principles of the task-based design, describes and classifies the tasks, and provides a descriptive account of the organization and sequencing of the tasks in the course schedule. It argues that such   an approach has much potential in second language curriculum development

1. INTRODUCTION

2. DIMENSIONS OF TASK AS THE UNIT OF ANALYSIS

3. ORAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN ACADEMIC SETTINGS

4. THE ORAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS COURSE

5. THE PRINCIPLES OF SYLLABUS DESIGN

6. DESCRIPTION OF TASKS

7. TASK DESIGN AND SEQUENCE IN THE COURSE SCHEDULE

A- Activities at the beginning of the course

B. Core activities

C. Supporting activities

D. Synthesizing activity

 . CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

CLICK ON

ادامه مطلب: 

ضرورت یادگیری زبان

with a special thanks to : S.HOSSEINZADE

? Why study language

What good is the scientific study of language? Why does anyone do it? Why should you care about it? These are the sorts of questions you have a right to ask about any university course. The answer to the last question depends a lot, of course, on how you happened to end up in a course using this book in the first place and on what your interests and long-term goals are. Language is a part of everyone's life, but it is more central to some people than to others. But I happen to believe that a scientific look at language should be a part of the basic curriculum, like mathematics and history are.

Second-language learning

Many of you have already studied one or more languages other than your first, and more of you will later on. A few of you may teach a foreign language. In either case, you are not likely to find the learning process an easy one. Some of the difficulties faced by second-language learners have to do with differences between their first and second languages, differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and usage. You do not have to know linguistics to learn a second language; after all, people all over the world who have never heard of linguistics do this successfully all the time. However, knowing what pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and usage are; how they can differ between languages; and how people seem to learn them (as first- or second-language learners) can help you be aware of and understand your problems and possibly correct some of them. A second-language teacher needs to be able to focus on problem areas, for example, by giving lots of practice or by simplifying other aspects of the language being learned. It is difficult, if not impossible, both to understand the source of the problem and to come up with ways of addressing it without understanding the nature of the material being learned, that is, what linguists and other language scientists study.

First-language learning

A GAME

Bad Fruit: A Shoppers' Nightmare

Level: Easy to Medium

This is an oral communication activity appropriate for EFL learners in elementary/primary school. (It's optimal for grades 3-6). This game is designed for practicing "shopping" dialogues and vocabulary.

Materials: "produce" and play money.

Object of Game: To accumulate as many products as possible.

Students are divided into clerks and shoppers.

The clerks set up "stands" to allow easy access for all shoppers (e.g. around the outsides of the room with their backs to the wall).

The shoppers are given a set amount of money* (e.g. dollars, euros, pounds, etc.) and begin at a stand where there is an open space.

Students shop, trying to accumulate as many items as possible (each item is 1 unit of currency).

Periodically, the instructor will say "stop" (a bell or other device may be needed to attract attention in some cultural and classroom contexts) and call out a name of one of the products. Students with that product must then put ALL their products in a basket at the front of the room. The remaining students continue shopping. Students who had to dump their products must begin again from scratch (with fewer units of currency).

The student with the most products at the end wins.

Students then switch roles.

*It is recommended giving students as much money as possible since students who run out can no longer participate.

Alternative play for more advanced students: Clerks set the price of items. Shoppers have the option of negotiating the price. There are two winners in this version: The shopper who accumulates the most products and the clerk who makes the most money.

UG

 Chomsky and the Universal Grammar

Noam Chomsky is well known on two fronts, as a philosopher and as a social thinker. He is justifiably famous today for his efforts to combat social injustice, which has led him to present a radical critique of the institutions of power in modern society. His fame initially arose, however, from his work as a linguistic philosopher and his still controversial suggestion that the human brain is somehow equipped at birth with a Universal Grammar out of which all human languages later develop. It is mainly with regard to this aspect of Chomsky's thought that I wish to comment here.

The human brain is indeed a remarkable organ, consisting as it does of billions upon billions of nerve cells that are daily dying and being replaced in vast numbers, but still for most of us retains its coherent function throughout our lives. There are two radically opposite accounts, however, of what that function is. The first and most familiar is that the brain is a thought generator, and its ability to function as such has developed incrementally and accidentally over billions of years in the manner described in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The second view is the one most effectively presented in the work of Rudolf Steiner, who insists that the brain's primary function is not to be a generator of thought, but an organ of perception, and that what it perceives is the spiritual 'inside' of all matter, which he tells us is what thought really is, a proposition now beginning to be borne out in Quantum Physics. This view and some of its many ramifications has been clearly represented to the modern mind in the work of the late Owen Barfield.

In the first (materialistic) account the brain function is analogous to that of a computer, and even though the brain is immensely complex, recent developments in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) have convinced many that it will soon become obsolete, and that this obsolescence will eventually apply to mankind itself.(See Christopher Dowden: "Last Flesh", Harper/Collins, Toronto, 1998). There are aspects of modern brain research, however, which suggest that this might not be the case, and that we have in fact barely begun to understand the brain's true function. Important in this respect has been the work of the Stanford University neurologist Karl Pibram, whose study of how memories are stored in the brain led him to postulate that the brain operates on a holographic basis wherein 'the whole is present in every part,' and suggesting that the real repository of memory is not the brain cells but somewhere outside of the brain. This ties together with the work of the physicists Alain Aspect and David Bohm in postulating a holographic background to the entire physical universe. (See The Universe as a Hologram).

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