Abstract:

The automated task design generator (taskGen) project brings together principles of task design and task-based research, constructs and techniques of instructed Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and corpus linguistics, as well as principles of task-based ICT and human-machine interaction design, with the aim to assist foreign language teachers and task designers with their communicative task design. The goal of this paper is to present the taskGen tool and the functionalities that apply in the task-cycle, pre-task and post-task creation. The tool allows for the generation of any kind of pedagogic task design by combining four dimensions: the number learner groups (information distribution), the number of participants in each group (split/shared information, one-way/two-way information flow), participant roles (interactive and cognitive variables) and the prompts informing task performance. Task designers can automatically manage the organization of participants and groups as well as the assignment of roles and prompts by means of a simple drag and drop pointing device. Pre-task capabilities for task preparation (text, audio-visual materials, and interaction activities) and post-task options to recycle pre-task and task language will also be presented. The tool comprises a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that can be applied across modules. The aim of these NLP tools is twofold: to semi-automatically detect specific linguistic items to which focus-on-form techniques can be applied (input enhancement and elaboration); and to provide information about the lexical, syntactic, morphological and phonetic content of the texts included in any of the modules (word frequency, lemmas, PoS, irregular forms, phrasal verbs, sentence length, subordinate clauses, connectors, among others). The tool also includes an output module for task design packaging and sharing. It prepares the teaching materials to be printed and taken to the classroom and also creates a package presented in a mini-web site with the organization of all the teaching materials and instructions included in the task and the comments by task designers. Qualitative data from reactions by teachers's involved in the co-construction of the tool will be presented. At the present stage of development, the taskGen tool resources have been created just for English, but the project will be extended to other languages in the near future.

Keywords:

TBLT, task design, lesson planning, web-based tool.