This course explores ways of teaching reading skills in English as Second and Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) using a task-based approach. You will be introduced to the concept of task and the key principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and learning. TBLT uses communicative tasks as the key unit for creating language learning activities. You will also examine the role of reading in real-life and in second and foreign language teaching and current thinking about the interface between TBLT and second language reading. You will explore how TBLT and teaching second language reading can be successfully integrated in practice through analysing task-based reading materials. The course culminates in creating task-based materials for teaching reading in your own language teaching contexts. After completing the course, you will be able to: 1. Explain the main components and tenets of a task-based approach to teaching language; 2. Explain the main issues involved in teaching reading; 3. Illustrate connections between TBLT approaches and the teaching of reading; 4. Integrate tasks into your own teaching; 5. Identify reading texts that are suitable for the construction of tasks; and 6. Construct reading tasks and sequences for use in your own classroom.
Interview with Professor Pauline Foster
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Del curso dictado por University of London
Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task Based Approach
144 calificaciones
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Designing Reading Tasks
Welcome to the last module on our MOOC. In this module we will focus on the way in which we can write materials: we will think about sources for texts, about finding suitable tasks for texts, and will practice write new tasks for texts that you have already read. We will end with two interviews: one with Caroline Herring, a teacher in London who talks about materials she wrote for her own learners, and the second with Prof. Pauline Foster, who talks about reading and reading tasks.
Conoce a los instructores
Dr Amos ParanReader in Second Language Education
UCL Institute of Education
Dr Andrea RévészSenior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
UCL Institute of Education
Dr Myrrh DomingoSenior Lecturer in Contemporary Literacies
UCL Institute of Education
[MUSIC]
Hello everyone I'm very pleased to be here tonight with Dr. Pauline Foster from St.
Mary's University, Pauline is a professor of Applied Linguistics at St. Mary's,
and today we'll be talking about second language reading tasks with Pauline.
Pauline is an expert on task-based language teaching, so
we are very pleased to have her here.
>> Thank you.
>> I guess my first question is what do you see as some key characteristics of
second language reading tasks?
>> I've thought about that for a while, and decided that the key ingredient for
all tasks, whether they're reading or not, is learner engagement.
So I think if you've got a task that learners are not going to engage with,
because you've chosen something which is dull,
boring, difficult, repetitive, it's just not going to work.
So in order to find a reading task, you've got to find the material which you
will learn as you think are going to go for and give their attention to.
I know that's a bit vague, but I do think that is probably the key ingredient.
>> Can you think of an example, like in a particular context, where you think,
let's say a particular activity might be more or less engaging?
>> Of course, it depends on who your learners are, how old they are?
Whether they're doing the classes because they have English for
special purposes in mind or general English.
So that's where you would start, but
I think that if you can bear in mind what they want their language to do for them,
when they're out in the broader world, and outside the classroom,
out in the broader world, that will give you a really good steer.
So it might be, can you imagine doing a task for English for
air traffic controllers?
That [LAUGH] would have to be, very specifically,
about air traffic control, which might be very boring for
other people, but would be presumably really engaging from them.
You could push me further on that one, I'm already thinking
imagine this scene where there's an impending mid-air crash.
How would you deal with that?
Plus that's going too far.
[LAUGH] That's going to far.
>> In many contexts, unfortunately teachers don't really have the chance
to choose what they like to use or
what they like to teach because they're given textbooks that they have to use.
Imagine that you're operating in this type of context.
Can you give some advice how a teacher might be able to adapt a task
which is the textbook to make it more task like?
>> Well, I don't have to imagine that, because I've been done it.
When I started my career as an English language teacher, properly,
I was in Japan.
And I worked for a company that produced its own textbook.
These were written by non native speakers, who had a particular view about what
was suitable for classrooms, and nearly everything that we did in those classrooms
that could count as a task, it was a reading task, was incredibly dull.
It was just stupefyingly boring.
And so, although I couldn't not teach it.
You had to, you were held to this day, this page on the textbook.
I did develop ways of subverting that, so at the same time you do the task but
you are doing it in ways which you think will engage the learners better.
So can I give you an example?
>> Yes, please.
>> In the textbook, there was this frequent recurrence of this sort of
typical American family, husband, wife, two children,
with their terribly typical and boring lives.
And there would be a reading that everybody had to do about
the day in the life of this family or assume that.
And it was mostly there in order to display some grammatical structures,
or some vocabulary or other.
And the dialogue between these people was really wooden.
So what I started doing was getting the students
to flesh out these characters more, to fix the husband and wife.
They were called Ralph and Helen.
And I got the students to start inventing the backstory, how they'd met each other.
How they've fallen in love, how they'd arrived at this sort of boring,
middle aged suburban existence.
The kinds of arguments they might have had.
The argument sort of for example what they would name their children and
the house they would live in.
And so parallel to these very boring tasks,
I had another thing going on every week.
And we were doing like a storyboard behind it.
And I had the impression that worked very well.
I certainly enjoyed myself as a teacher more.
Because I had broadened the task, and I never asked if the students liked it.
They didn't have any choice.
[LAUGH] But I think you can always subvert a task as a teacher, and you always have
to subvert a task as a teacher, because you've got to make it fit your class.
And you've also got to be able to think on your feet so
that even what do of an interesting task starts going wrong.
You've got to change it midway through I think.
>> And that's difficult, especially when you're an inexperience teacher.
>> It's very difficult, but
perhaps you have to have experience of tasks that going wrong.
>> Mm-hm.
>> A lot.
For you to learn how to pick them up and move them around.
So yes, that's what I would do.
The task in the book is the starting point.
>> If there's a task.
>> If there's a task.
Well, I don't even know that these were tasks actually because
the definition of a task is obviously something which is very meaning oriented.
And what I was doing in Japan was something that was very form oriented,
so I think I made them into tasks, because an orientation tools form is deadly.
It has to be something that does that, but it has to be something we're
those stretches have taken off and people can enjoy themselves more.
And I think that even if the textbook writer has given you a task,
it's only the starting point and I think that when you're planning your class,
you know it's page 38 tomorrow, you need [LAUGH] to think about
how you're going to do that differently so that people enjoyable.
>> Thank you.
Now, let's imagine more of an ideal scenario.
When you are a teacher who's got a lot of time on your hands,
very creative, and you can do whatever you'd like in terms of teaching.
And you'd like to design your reading tasks.
How would you go about that, what are the steps that you would take?
>> Well, of course, that situation is quite rare.
And I'm totally sympathetic to teachers who want to follow a textbook.
I think it's very unfair to say that they have to be creative all the time and
come bouncing in the classroom with new material, I think that's a fantasy world.
But if we go into that fantasy world,
occasionally know you've got time to design something.
What I would start with, with the reading task is something which is authentic,
simply because that's easier.
You'd be looking in newspapers, online, or
you'd be looking out for something with a story that's in the press.
Or it's something engaging, something that interests you.
It has to interest you or it won't interest them.
And you build on that.
So if you think you've found something really engaging, and
it's not difficult to do that now that we've got online sources.
There's just millions of things going on out there.
And even if you go onto a newspaper website or the BBC website,
they select them for you.
There's a little sort of sidebars where they say,
maybe you'd be interested in this one.
As an example, I thought of before I came here, there's this fantastic story,
recently, of a cat that had gone missing for a year, it's very tragic.
And then, had shown up two miles away
from the house in a cat food factory, and I thought this was brilliant.
The cat had found the source of food
which was obviously much better than it was getting at home.
I was just living in the factory.
And they thought they had a burglar because it's tripping the alarm all
the time and they eventually discovered on the security cameras that it was a cat.
Now, who wouldn't like that?
I mean, I can imagine there might be some very sort of dull people that wouldn't
fall for that.
But that is engaging, is a sort of saying that you might say did you hear about this
cat that was, when they found it by the way it was massively overweight which was
the other thing about it.
The [INAUDIBLE] gone from being a very small cat, a very large cat,
there was a picture of it, and it was the size of a dog.
So I would start there.
That's I think is an engaging story.
I think that I would choose an authentically
written piece about that because you could find it in all sorts of newspapers.
And that I would give it to students to work on in pairs, actually.
That they would have to read it together to make sure that they understood it.
So that they could help each other out if there was vocabulary which they were
stuck on.
So I think that's quite important to do the task with someone else.
And I could imagine taking it from there into asking them to,
depending on their age group of course, to recreate that as their own writing.
Or to recreate it even, dare I say, as a speaking task,
where they would tell the story to an audience.
If they were children,
they could be doing a school newspaper where they would try to tell stories.
If they were adults you probably wouldn't want to do that.
So you can see it's going to very much depend on who you've got and
what they want and how much they want to enjoy themselves and
how serious they are about it.
But I think the whole idea of starting with the text which exist already
is actually very important.
>> And what happens, let's say, if you got a lower level
group of learners who might not be able to read this story as is?
Would you modify the text, or would you try to look for
something that's probably more simple?
>> It's a question which gets people quite cross.
It's about whether it should be completely authentic or
whether you should've fiddled with it.
When you know that the reading age for
a lot of the papers is about eight, isn't it.
As if you were to take something from the Metro, for example, in London,
this is a free newspaper that's existing, it's millions or view more.
You probably wouldn't have to.
If you took it from approaching newspaper, maybe you would.
But I would try not to because I would like students to ask each other
what does that mean.
Especially with, for example,
the panel that you get with the headline is obviously very bewildering.
It would be nice to have some sort of chats about that but
I would provide a gloss only if it was like saying this happened in.
What's that?
Northwest London.
Something like that.
But otherwise I would want them to work it out for themselves.
>> Would you give any help with vocabulary before the task begins?
>> No.
No, they'll tell me, or they'll figure it out.
You know the technique of dict gloss, that
Merrill Swain is quite fond of, I think that works quite well as well.
>> Would you mind explaining to our listeners what [CROSSTALK]
>> Dict gloss is like a game in play where
there is a text and you read it, you understand it and then it's taken off you.
And you're given a set of prompts, sort of the key things.
But you have to write it again, and importantly, with someone else.
So in recreating the text, you have someone else whose memory, and
someone else whose English ability as well to help you out, but
that you are actually, she would argue, genuinely focusing on form.
On written form, when you're doing it.
And I think that is undoubtedly true, that in, when you've already sorted
out the meaning and now you have to pay attention to the form.
She's writing especially about French,
where the written form, it's not intuitive.
There's a lot of accents you need to put on, there's a lot of silent letters.
And of verbal morphology which you don't pronounce but you only write.
English isn't quite like that but I still think that would be quite useful to do, so
the task exists and then it has to be passed through your mind.
Both that something you talk about and it's something you write down and
then perhaps it exists again at the end, as close to the original as possible.
>> Thank you.
Just the last question.
You've touched upon this already.
But I thought it's still worth asking because you might have some
additional thoughts that, what do you see,
as the main challenges, of designing reading tasks?
Or implementing reading tasks and any advice?
How these might be- >> [LAUGH]
>> Addressed?
[LAUGH] >> It's very difficult to answer
your question.
I think, because it's a complex one.
It's easy to answer the question, what wouldn't you do?
And what, the sort of reading
I really don't like are the ones which have been written around the form.
So you've focused that class on the present perfect.
So there's some text which is filled with these verb forms.
So where the form is dominant, and
the text itself is subservient to displaying the form.
I think you're running into more into the likelihood
that you are going to bore people with it if they're just display vehicles.
So that's why I said in the beginning,
I'd always want to start with something that was real.
And then see what you can take out of it.
So that would sort of disqualify a reading task for a PPP lesson probably.
Where you might be looking at what we've want to practice this and
if it needs to be in a text.
So I suppose the final thing to say, what do people normally read for?
Why would you normally read something?
Have you been told to read it?
As we know that's a big turn off,
because students will say, well, no I haven't really, I didn't want to.
Or you've been attracted to reading it, and so
I think if you can sort of piggy back on the they've been attracted to reading it,
then you've got more chance that they will engage with it.
And engagement always brings attention.
>> Based on what you're saying,
it might be a good idea to give students choices, different text.
Because then at least they have some say in what they would like.
>> Yeah, I mean, that's true, isn't it?
You could be like we do online.
[SOUND] You see, it's click bait, isn't it, isn't it?
You have the headline.
Do I want to read that?
So yes, I think that's a pretty good idea, actually.
Yes.
I'll add that to my repertoire.
>> Thank you very much.
[MUSIC]
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