© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Learner mining of pre-task and task input
Jeremy Scott Boston has been trying to make task-based learning palatable for Japanese EFL students for over 10 years. He currently teaches at Hiroshima Shudo University, Japan
Email: jboston{at}shudo-u.ac.jp
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Abstract |
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The findings reported in this article suggest that learners inevitably ‘mine’ wordings contained in pre-task and task materials when performing tasks, even when the teacher did not explicitly draw learner attention to these features. However, this was found to be true only with written materials, and learners did not appear to mine specific wordings from audio pre-task materials. Learner mining of language input from written pre-task/task materials opens the possibility of deliberately embedding specific language items into such materials. While the article acknowledges that such an approach to task design is controversial, with some arguing that it is inconsistent with principles behind task-based learning, the article leaves it to the reader to decide if finding ways of harnessing learner mining of wordings from pre-task input is in harmony with the principles of a task-based approach.