Task design: What happened to the girl?

Ph Vivian

April 2018

*The template of the task description is adapted from Zhang (2012)

Goal

1.     Describe the fraction you see to get the complete picture using IN, ON, UNDER, and BEHIND. It should be noted that to get the whole picture come into sight, the collected descriptions of the fractions should be of the presence of IN, ON, UNDER, and BEHIND. Work with your friends to make sure the whole picture will be presented within the allotted time.

2.      What happened to the girl? (Is it a suicide, an accident or a murder or any other cases?)

Rationale

The goal of this task is to indicate whether it is a suicide, an accident or a murder or any other cases that happened to the girl in the picture. To do so, each student needs to describe a split part of the picture. The pictorial content is quite complex due to different clues which could be the important point to find out the answer. The task, therefore, requires intermediate level language skills.

Describing the split images gets students involved in using (at least) the required prepositions of place IN, ON, UNDER, BEHIND. Students, then, are required to discuss and negotiate their interpretation of what happen to the girl in the picture and draw out the conclusion that it is a suicide, an accident, a murder or any other cases which makes the outcome of this part open-ended.

Description and the Procedure

Students work in dyads synchronously in a chat room. Each student receives either part of the picture (figure 1). First of all, students describe the parts of the picture to each other and try to figure out the correct position of stuffs in the scene. The description of the presented fraction is typed (by students) into a box below it before sending to the community. The collection of the complete picture’s descriptions needs to be of at least four prepositions IN, ON, UNDER, and BEHIND before it comes into sight on the screens. It is noted that additional descriptions without the required prepositions are encouraged to get a more accurate prediction in the second part of the task. 

In the next step, students discuss to find out what truly happened to the girl and submit their decision to the instructor. (Note: Relevant vocabulary related to the parts of picture should be accordingly included in the requirement.)

Type/ information flow Jigsaw task/ two-way	Outcome Part 1: closed Part 2: open	Contextual support/ complexity Visual cues/ medium
Mode synchronous	Groups dyads	Level intermediate
Communicative demand high	Required interaction medium	Discourse functions/ skills prepositions

Production and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14(1). Retrieved from http://cie.asu.edu/.

Figure 1: Adapted from a detective story on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfnKFwdGwZc

Figure 2: Fractions of the picture

The design employs the image of a scene of a crime or an accident or a suicide to provoke thinking as well as intrinsic interests. In my personal education context, the majority of my students are young (aged from 15 to 24) and they are willing to be challenged by solving problems, especially discovering the truth behind detective stories. It is believed that the students would completely engage in the task since Taylor and Parsons (2011) claim that in order to improve students’ engagement, the tasks need to require and instil deep thinking.

As for task type, the first part of the task designed is a pedagogical task when students are required to describe the divided parts of the picture using the given prepositions of place (IN, ON, UNDER, BEHIND). Whereas, the second part of the task is the real world task where students use their personal knowledge and opinion to discuss and make a decision of what truly happened to the girl. Zhang (op.cit.) asserts that decision-making task “require[s] learners to arrive at a particular outcome, which often only can be achieved by engaging in multiple negotiations and turns communicating between students” (p.5). Zhang (op.cit.) also mentions that as proved by Smith (2003) and Keller-Lally (2006), decision-making tasks produce more negotiations compared to jigsaw. Accordingly, to complete the task, students need to communicate together, exchange ideas in order to fill the information gap from each other. Moreover, they need to express their own thinking over what happened to the girl and explain why. As a result, they are expected to focus on meaning rather than form.

Additionally, with respect to the structuring of the task, Zhang (op.cit.) mentions that “the unstructured/optional task allowed for an open-ended outcome, whereas the structured/required task was based on a narrow and controlled design” (p.8). The task is divided into two subtasks and the complexity of the tasks is gradually increasing. This could be because while the first one is considered as a structured design, the second one is the unstructured task by doing which students have more choices and answers based on their personal perspectives. Furthermore, Brown, Anderson, Shilcock and Yule (1984) suggest that static tasks (e.g. description) are considered to be simple than abstract tasks (e.g. opinion giving or problem solving). Zhang also reveals his agreement with Brandl (2008) that although it may take less time for students to work with pre-structured tasks and they also pay attention to the accuracy of the output, “students produced more language in unstructured than in structured tasks in the synchronous mode” (Zhang, op.cit., p.8).

There actually exist other task types that go along the two – synchronously communicative tasks. While the communicative task which goes along the first part is closed, the one goes along the second part is open and obviously the communicative tasks employed in this case are two-way since the information is held by many (or at least four) students. It is suggested by Smith (2003) and Keller-Lally (2006), open-outcome tasks which allow students to propose a mix variety of potential solutions employ more negotiations (cited in Zhang, 2012). Accordingly, the language outputs tend to be more in use compared to those of closed-outcome tasks.

Regarding the task’s characteristics, the task could be challenging to the elementary students. It is due to the fact that the task requires them to have certain knowledge of the target language to describe the images in details by mentioning the positions of all the stuffs presented through which students use the prepositions IN, ON, UNDER, BEHIND. Despite the complexity of the task (which should be considered closely in designing a task serving a specific purpose – see Robinson 2001), it has exploited the pictured-based content which is, in comparison with its counterpart – text-based materials, easier to achieve the outcome (Zhang, 2012).

In general, for the abovementioned justifications, the task is designed to serve as a TELL activity that can challenge students while they are adequately visually supported for the purpose of using ON, IN, UNDER, and BEHIND.

REREFENCES

Brandl, K. (2008). Communicative language teaching in action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Brown, G., Anderson, A., Shilcock, R., & Yule, G. (1984) Teaching Talk Strategies for
Production and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robinson, P. (2001). Task complexity, Task Difficulty, and Task Production: Exploring Interactions in a Componential Framework. Applied Linguistics 22(1), 27-57.

Taylor, L. & Parsons, J. (2011). Improving Student Engagement. Current Issues in Education,

Zhang, F. (2012). Computer-enhanced and mobile-assisted language learning: Emerging issues and trends. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.