The definitions presented in the webinar for classifying different types of activities (rehearsal/activation tasks vs. language exercises/communicative activities) seem flexible. I disagree with some of the classifications made by the instructor for some of the examples. It also seemed to me that the three criteria that formed the definition of a task in the linguistic sense seemed to diminish in importance by the second half of the session. Some of the classifications made in the second half didn't seem to reference the criteria established earlier. Maybe I didn't fully understand some of the definitions; they just seemed to be open to interpretation and sensitive to the classroom context. I've read papers written in the 1990s , particularly Willis (1990) "The Lexical Syllabus" that questioned the task status of activities involving role play, finding role playing activities to be wanting to a certain extent when it came to creating a facsimile of a target language environment in the classroom. I would tend to classify activities involving role playing as activation activities or any of the others depending on the task content, but not rehearsal unless the roles were roles the students do in fact play in their day-to-day lives or will fill in the future but currently have a reasonable amount of associated background knowledge; that way they aren't being asked to invent those roles plus associated conversation and language. It's a problem I've run into, especially when the roles are more professional in nature as opposed to common roles that everyone reasonably plays. In the classroom, the resulting conversations seem to lack a certain validity that would be present if there was a person who actually filled that professional role present in the classroom for the students to interact with.
The definitions presented in the webinar for classifying different types of activities (rehearsal/activation tasks vs. language exercises/communicative activities) seem flexible. I disagree with some of the classifications made by the instructor for some of the examples. It also seemed to me that the three criteria that formed the definition of a task in the linguistic sense seemed to diminish in importance by the second half of the session. Some of the classifications made in the second half didn't seem to reference the criteria established earlier. Maybe I didn't fully understand some of the definitions; they just seemed to be open to interpretation and sensitive to the classroom context. I've read papers written in the 1990s , particularly Willis (1990) "The Lexical Syllabus" that questioned the task status of activities involving role play, finding role playing activities to be wanting to a certain extent when it came to creating a facsimile of a target language environment in the classroom. I would tend to classify activities involving role playing as activation activities or any of the others depending on the task content, but not rehearsal unless the roles were roles the students do in fact play in their day-to-day lives or will fill in the future but currently have a reasonable amount of associated background knowledge; that way they aren't being asked to invent those roles plus associated conversation and language. It's a problem I've run into, especially when the roles are more professional in nature as opposed to common roles that everyone reasonably plays. In the classroom, the resulting conversations seem to lack a certain validity that would be present if there was a person who actually filled that professional role present in the classroom for the students to interact with.
There's reference to handouts associated with this video. Can they be made available?
I can't find part 2. Can you send me the link?