4. 4 TYPE AN ACTIVITY
1. Experience activities try to keep as much as possible of the knowledge
needed to perform the activity within the learners’ previous experience.
This can be done in several ways:
• The teacher
• The knowledge needed to do the activity is provided through pre?vious lessons or
previous activities within a lesson
• The teacher helps the learners to share and recall previous experi?ence to make the
following activity easier
5. 2,Shared activities involve the learners achieving through group work
100 Format and Presentation
what they could not achieve by working alone. Nation (1989b) describes
four major kinds of group work:
• the learners in a group have equal access to the same information
• each learner has a different piece of information essential to the
completion of the task
• one or more learners have all the information that the others need
• the learners share the same information but each has a different task to
do
6. 3. Guided activities involve the learners doing already partly completed
tasks
They therefore are found early in a lesson. A very common format for learning spoken
language is as follows:
• The presentation of the model piece of language
• The learners do guided tasks on parts of the model to prepare for the next section of
the lesson.
• The learners do activities like role plays or discussions resulting in meaning-focused
production of language that is like the model.
8. 4. We have looked at experience,
shared and guided activities.
Experience tasks rely on support from
previous knowledge. Shared tasks rely
on support from other people and
guided tasks rely on support in the
activity itself.
9. TASK AND PRESENTATION
The arguments that task-based learning advocates like Long and
Crookes (1992) presented against other types of syllabus are mostly argu?ments about the
presentation of material rather than the selection of content.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, tasks can be present in either a task?supported or a task-
based syllabus
Willis (1996) describes the task-based learning framework as consisting of three phases – pre-
task, the task cycle and language focus. Considerable variety and variation is possible within this
framework, and, the task need not focus on a specific language structure.
Summary of the Steps
• Decide on the main teaching techniques and activities.
• Plan the format of the lessons.
• Check the format against principles.
• Write the lessons.
