This article was first published 13 June 2018 in Early View, TESOL Journal. Subscribers can access issues here. Only TESOL members may subscribe. To become a member of TESOL, please click here, and to purchase articles, please visit Wiley-Blackwell. © TESOL International Association.

1 INTRODUCTION

Unlike the more homogeneous learners in a typical English as a foreign language class, learners in an English as a second language (ESL) class usually present a wider range of backgrounds, experiences, learning and literacy needs, language skill levels, and learning goals. Mixed‐level classes of heterogeneous students tend to be the norm in ESL contexts, so teachers face the challenge of balancing and addressing the complex needs of these diverse learners. Unfortunately, many commercially produced instructional materials are of limited use to ESL teachers who teach mixed‐level classes, particularly those who teach adult immigrants in needs‐based settlement classes where instruction is learner‐centered and task‐based. Settlement classes are designed to help immigrants successfully adjust to life in their new country. These particular classes are both needs‐based and learner‐centered because they do not have a rigid, preset curriculum but are instead structured to address the students’ linguistic and broader settlement needs (e.g., their health, well‐being, and integration into society). A needs‐based settlement class begins with a language needs analysis, and the topics and tasks identified by the newcomers enrolled in the class become the focus of the lessons. The task‐based lessons not only teach students how to carry out real world tasks, but also have the students undertake the tasks.

Task‐based language teaching is “characterized by activities that engage language learners in meaningful, goal‐oriented communication to solve problems, complete projects, and reach decisions” (Pica, 2008, p. 71). This teaching approach is an effective means of addressing some of the challenges instructors face when teaching needs‐based mixed‐level ESL classes. Needs‐based settlement classes require instructors to design their own materials using authentic resources in order to help their students complete genuine communicative tasks that they have expressed a need to accomplish in the real world. The focus on real‐world tasks that are “important to students obviates the need for … teachers to contrive artificial lesson content” (Long, 2015, p. 162) and provides a meaningful space to optimize language learning (Van Gorp & Deygers, 2013).

Real‐world tasks are activities people think of when planning, conducting, or recalling their day. That can mean things like brushing their teeth, preparing breakfast, reading a newspaper, taking a child to school, responding to e‐mail messages, making a sales call, attending a lecture or a business meeting, having lunch with a colleague from work, helping a child with homework, coaching a soccer team, and watching a TV program. (Long, 2015, p. 6)

With respect to the language classroom, Skehan (1998, 2014) characterizes tasks as activities in which there is a primary focus on meaning, a goal to be met, a real‐world relationship, and success is evaluated in terms of an outcome. Similarly, Samuda and Bygate (2008) define a pedagogical task as “a holistic activity which engages language use in order to achieve some non‐linguistic outcome while meeting a linguistic challenge, with the overall aim of promoting language learning, through process or product or both” (p. 69). A broader definition of a classroom task is found in Willis and Willis's (2007) suggestion that “the most effective way to teach a language is by engaging learners in real language use in the classroom … by designing tasks—discussions, problems, games and so on—which require learners to use language for themselves” (p. 1). In the context of language testing, Bachman and Palmer (1996) define a task that can be employed to assess language use as “an activity that involves individuals in using language for the purpose of achieving a particular goal or objective in a particular situation” (p. 44). The overlapping characteristics in these definitions are that tasks are functional activities that engage learners in goal‐oriented, meaningful language use.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how three task frameworks (Skehan, 1998; Bowler & Parminter, 2002; Lynch, 2009) can be used by ESL teachers to guide their selection and design of classroom language tasks for classes with mixed levels of students.

This article first appeared in TESOL Journal Early View, 13 June 2018. For permission to use text from this article, please go to Wiley-Blackwell.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.386