Task Design (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Discussion and Essays, grade: 1, University of Auckland (Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics), course: Task-based Language Teaching, language: English, abstract: Introduction

When our group was discussing the level of proficiency and the interests/preferences of the learners that would work on our task, we came to the conclusion that a thrilling story with interpersonal conflicts would be perfectly suitable. I started off with the first chapter and passed it on to the next person, who then added chapter two, introducing a new character to the plot. As we had five people in our group, the final story consists of five paragraphs and five different characters.
Each of us comes from a different cultural background, which gives the story different perspectives. When I started with the first chapter I did not imagine the end to be as it is now. I was geared to French and Scandinavian thrillers, and therefore made my character come alive from a European viewpoint. Chapter three, four and five were written by our female, Asian group members, whose view of relationships and dilemmas are very different from mine. Their focus lies in double-faced characters, responsibilities towards family members and the burden of a student or working life. Chapter two was produced by the only native English speaker of our group, as can be seen by his use of vocabulary and sentence structure. This chapter also describes the most complex relation between people, with a third, nameless player entering the stage. Personal and literal experiences have had distinct influences on us and hence, a diverse outcome has been produced by us.
I consider our group work as a task by itself, the task to design a task. We had to use our second language in order to communicate in the seminar room. We had to write our story in our second language, using our own linguistic resources. We also had to send and reply to emails in our second language to request clarification. Each of us had an information gap, as we did not know any other part of the plot except the one we wrote (there were some minor opinion gaps as well). We used our own language resources (with occasional help of our native speaker) and then we had a clear outcome: our task.
I will not go into more detail here as my paper focuses on a description of our task and the learners, a lesson plan and a rationale.