ELTRIA 2019 Roundup - Dizzy Taskals
ELT RESEARCH IN ACTION (ELTRIA) 2019
Roundup - 'Dizzy Taskals'
DIZZY TASKALS: Three TBLT talks from the 2019 ELTRIA conference
There are those that say that the world is becoming more disunited with each day that passes: right vs left; leave vs remain; even Jon Snow and Daenerys are at it. To those people, I say: where were you on the 26th and 27th April 2019? For if these haters had come on these days to a very specific corner of Barcelona’s burgeoning business district, and paid the entrance fee, they would have seen two communities of practice brought together in the most perfect fusion since the Teriyaki Burrito.
Key themes from the practitioner side involved empowerment, agency, and autonomy, while researchers presented findings on translanguaging, technology, and tools. Amidst the flurry of information and innovation, there was one topic that kept popping up like a porous log in a roaring torrent: Task-Based Language Teaching. And it’s not hard to see why: If the gap between research and practice in ELT is a wide valley, then in TBLT it is a deep ocean trench – dark, unexplored, and brimming with the unknown. Indeed, Neil McMillan from Serveis Lingüístics de Barcelona notes that the TBLT gap may be one that is never completely bridged. But that won’t stop him from trying, as it shouldn’t us.
What follows is a summary of three TBLT talks from this year’s ELTRIA conference: bringing together two communities of practice.
Ingrid Mora-Plaza (UB) - L2 Pronunciation: The Design of Focus-on-Phonetic-Form Tasks
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| Ingrid Mora-Plaza, UB |
PhD candidate Ingrid Mora-Plaza starts out boldly, slamming down some hard-hitting truths. Firstly, L2 pronunciation is mostly neglected in the EFL classroom – teachers generally deal with student errors as, or after, they arise. Secondly, even when teachers do work a pronunciation focus into their lesson plans, it tends to be decontextualised from communicative practice. Thirdly (teachers relax, this one’s not on us), there’s been hardly any research into the links between meaning-focussed tasks and L2 pronunciation. It’s not what we expected on a Saturday morning, but it’s hard to argue with.
With 18 of the 20 minutes remaining, the audience takes a breath and hopes that Mora-Plaza has some bridge-building ideas up her sleeve. Luckily, she doesn’t disappoint – a collective sigh of relief as the presenter directs our attention to a glimmering abbreviation at the bottom of her slide: TBLT. Mora-Plaza explains how tasks can be manipulated to draw attention to, or create episodes with, language form. Typically, form has been synonymous with grammar, but the presenter points out that it needn’t be so: focus on phonetic form is valid, possible, and even beneficial. Things are looking up.
But what about increasing the complexity of the task? Would it affect students’ ability to identify phonemes, to discriminate between two similar-sounding sounds, or to produce those sounds? Mora-Plaza thinks it might do, and goes on to explain a study which she aimed to find out just that. Using a test group and a control group, the researchers designed a task that could be complexified by adding reasoning demands and diversifying the language items the learners were exposed to. The increased task complexity resulted in increasingly complex language-related episodes, and the test group were later able to identify, discriminate, and produce the target sounds more accurately than their control-group peers. Why? Doubtless because the task created language episodes that forced the learners to notice, analyse, and integrate the phonetic form, ‘pushing’ their output in successively more complex tasks that lead to cumulative learning. Or it could just have been down to chance. It probably wasn’t down to chance.
Dr Roger Gilabert - Bringing Form to Focus in Task Design
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| Dr. Roger Gilabert: Bringing form to focus, and boundless energy to plenaries |
Dr. Gilabert, who worked with Mora-Plaza on the aforementioned increasing-complexity intervention, is clearly a devout believer in his trade, to the extent that the reasoning demands he places on his audience increase as his plenary talk progresses.
It’s a smooth ride at first, with a characteristically exuberant insight into the doctor’s research interests, and a fitting shoutout to a school in Barcelona who have managed to ditch coursebooks and realign their curriculum towards tasks and projects. He gives a tidy definition of tasks, and points out that, now more than ever, language learning is informal and driven by meaning, with learners generally ignoring that which does not interest them. As teachers, therefore, we should try to create situations that make our learners run into language problems in which meaning is key.
Things rapidly take a turn for the complex, however, as Gilabert gets to the core message of his plenary: a well-designed task should include focus on form. Such focus on form can range from implicit to explicit. As we learned from Ingrid Mora-Plaza, form doesn’t have to mean grammar. We can also draw learners’ attention to phonetics, lexis, and pragmatics/discourse. The tricky bit comes to when we have to decide what form to focus on, when to do it, and how. On that last point, Gilabert lists his all-time favourites:
● Input Flooding - Designing a text or task that is flooded with the form that is being focussed on, e.g. the map task above, which is flooded with /i:/ and /ɪ/ contrasts.
● Input Enhancement - Drawing learners’ attention to form by highlighting or increasing font size of the desired feature, which enhances its perceptual saliency. For example, we can call attention to the third-person singular ‘s’ so that it appearS bigger, or we can highlight multi-word combinations so that learners pay attention to them.
● Task-essential language - Designing a task that is difficult to achieve without processing the desired form. For example, an information gap about a train timetable would be tricky to complete without noticing, processing, and integrating language for telling the time.
It is up to the teacher to work with learners to discover their needs, and select the what: the forms that are of most use to them. As for the when, he notes that we can think about it pro-actively (in task design) reactively (as learners perform tasks) and post-actively (after the task). To wrap up his talk, Dr. Gilabert leaves us with a very juicy, very quotable nugget of wisdom that I have no good reason for not including here:
“...unless we offer what the learner is ready to learn, we may prohibit acquisition and lower motivation. Making tasks adaptable allows us to promote differentiation, give relevant feedback, and obliterate the dichotomy between meaning and form.”
Dr Neil McMillan (SLB) - It’s a Long shot, but…. Initiatives to bridge the gap between TBLT and practice
Anyone who came to McMillan’s talk looking for shots, long or otherwise, left sorely disappointed. There was no hard liquor, no firearms, not even an intravenous innoculation. What we did get was an insider’s look into the chasm in TBLT between research and practice, including the different aspects of the gap and some initiatives through which they might be (partially) bridged. McMillan talks about three types of gap in TBLT:
● The coursebook-dominated syllabus gap - Most schools use a coursebook, and most coursebooks leave very little space for TBLT. They are characterized by “focus on formS” instruction and high-stakes testing, meaning that even if teachers are well-versed in TBLT, they’re often too constrained by their syllabus to implement it.
● The expertise gap - McMillan lambasts pre-service training courses for only paying “lip service” to TBLT. Often, he says, the problem is that the trainers themselves lack the expertise necessary to deliver in-depth instruction.
● The cultural/structural gap - Leapfrogging nicely off James Venner & Melanie Brennan’s earlier talk on working conditions for EL teachers in Barcelona, McMillan recognised that most teachers, underpaid and overworked as they are, simply don’t have the drive to integrate what is currently a resource-poor approach to language instruction. Schools are unwilling or unable to invest in structural change, especially one that isn’t driven by student expectations.
Having deftly outlined the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing TBLT practice, McMillan draws the audience’s attention to his ‘but’, rewarding us with a glimmer of hope and imploring us not to be put off by the size of the gap. He explains three initiatives the SLB has taken towards bridging the gap:
1. Their first step was to offer a practical TBLT course for teachers and managers through their e-learning platform, learn.slb. Currently in its first iteration, the course aims to position Mike Long’s version of TBLT at the forefront of ELT, and features contributions from Long himself, as well as experts Roger Gilabert and Geoff Jordan.
2. The second initiative was to streamline the process of transforming real-life tasks into pedagogic tasks. Working with Roger Gilabert and a cohort of undergraduate students, the SLB developed a set of Needs Analyses based around learners’ vocations, and looked at how these might take the form of a language-learning syllabus. The results of these fed into the third initiative,...
3. ...a materials bank organised not by level or discrete grammar point, but by task. McMillan plans to open this bank up to non-members of the co-operative, reducing the burden on teachers who want to incorporate TBLT into their classroom.
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| McMillan breaks out an impromptu Haka to keep energy levels high. |
By now the room is brimming with excitement; the last time I saw a group of teachers this riled up was when the staff room got a new guillotine. McMillan brings us back down to Earth, however, recognising that the TBLT gaps are probably far too large to be completely overcome, and the best we can do is hope to improve the bridge.
A little disheartening, perhaps, but it’s something we can all get on board with. Long journeys start with small steps, and where would we be without the noble art of bridge maintenance?
Summary written by Matt Evans, EIM Teacher.
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