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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
This present study aims to examine the effects of task-based activities on EFL elementary students' reading comprehension in a public elementary school in Taipei.
This chapter reviews the literature related to the key issues addressed in this study in six sections. Section one describes the importance of teaching reading. Section two reviews the theories of reading. Section three proposes the reading skills and the teaching approach for elementary students in Taipei. Section four discusses learning attitudes. Section five introduces task-based language teaching, and the last section reviews previous studies on task-based instruction.
The Importance of Teaching Reading to L2 Young Learners As “every aspect of life involves reading” (Roe, Smith & Burns, 2005, p. 3), being able to read is a vital life skill that one must have in order to communicate with other people, and to function effectively in today's society. However, not all of the children are aware of the importance of learning to read. Children who fail to see the benefits of being able to read are less likely to be motivated to learn. Thus, teachers should design activities that help students understand the importance of being able to read. For example, Anderson (1988) suggested the career education activity for middle-grade students. When conducting this activity, the teacher may ask students to list down the required reading skills of the occupations they are interested and invite people to speak to the class about why and how they needed reading in their jobs.
While arousing students' awareness of the importance of reading and how reading relates to future success, teachers should also provide students with tasks that help them learn to read continually. However, learning to read in a foreign language has
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never been an easy task for second language learners. Anderson (2003) pointed out the fact that the average second language learners' reading ability is lower than that of the first language; that explains the reasons why learning to read in English is
challenging to EFL students. As reading is “an essential skill which is the most important skill to master for most of the learners of English in order to ensure success in learning” (Anderson, 2003, p. 2), reading is regarded as the primary skill for second language learners to succeed in academic contexts (Grabe, 1991). Since Taiwan has made English a required learning subject (Ediger, 2001) for elementary students, there is an increased focus on teaching children how to read in English in Taiwan. However, many elementary students are not aware of the importance of learning to read in
English. When they become middle-grade students (e.g., fourth-grade) or high-grade students, they find the reading texts become difficult, and contain unfamiliar words and complex sentence structures. Some students may become demotivated because they have problems with reading in English (Chall & Jacobs, 2003). Given the emerging needs to teach reading to elementary students as well as to help students deal with their reading difficulties, English teachers should teach students basic reading skills to help them develop their reading abilities.
Theories of Reading
Reading is viewed as a cognitive activity that takes place in the human mind and is defined as “the process of receiving and interpreting information encoded in
language form via the medium of print” (Urquhart & Weir, 1998, p. 22). However, psycholinguists view reading as “a psycholinguistic guessing game” (Goodman, 1967, P. 127). The reading process is a “psycholinguistic process by which the reader, a
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writer as graphic display” (Goodman, 1971, p. 135). According to Goodman (1967), reading is a selective process, the reader reconstructs the meaning of a written message through the process of “sampling, predicting, testing and confirming” (cited in Coady, 1979, p. 5). Despite the readers' proficiency levels in that particular
language, the readers need to actively involve themselves in the process of relating the meanings of printed texts to what the readers already know to gradually construct the entire meaning of a text. According to Coady (1979), “the most fluent readers may use a minimum sampling of text” (p. 6) while less skilled readers may need to select much more samples from the texts.
The Schema Theory
According to Carrell and Eisterhold’s (1983) schema theory, “comprehending a text is an interactive process between the reader’s background knowledge and the text” (p. 553), Carrell and Eisterhold divided the schemata into two categories – formal schemata and content schemata. The formal schemata refer to the “background knowledge of the formal, rhetorical or organizational structures of different types of text” (p. 560), for example, the reader’s knowledge about the differences in the organizational forms of simple stories, poetry, and newspaper articles and so on. The content schemata refer to “the background knowledge of the content area of a text” (p.
560), for example, background knowledge about the topic or the content of a text. The notion of content schemata is similar to the background knowledge in Coady’s (1979) model of the ESL reader. In addition to these two categories, James (1987) proposed linguistic schemata, which include the linguistic knowledge of the target language such as the decoding skills for recognizing words and sentences. In conclusion, the
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development of background knowledge is important to second language learners, and the familiarity with a schema will facilitate reading comprehension (Swaffar, 1988).
The Reading Models
According to Harris and Sipay (1985), the theoretical models of reading process can be categorized as bottom-up, top-down, or interactive. In the bottom-up model, reading is considered as a text-driven process in which the meaning is constructed from recognizing the printed letters and words, and then understanding phrases and sentences, and finally comprehending the entire reading passages. The bottom-up process is associated with the use of reading skills such as letter and sound correspondences, word recognition, word analysis and sentence parsing, and text comprehension skills, for example, identifying discourse linguistic relationships in the text (Barnet, 1989; Urquhart & Weir, 1998). Contrastingly, the top-down model refers to a reader-driven process, in which readers generate hypotheses or make predictions about the texts (Barnet, 1989; Urquhart & Weir, 1998). For example, the readers may use the visual cues or clues from sentences to predict what will happen next, and read the keywords that confirm their expectations. The interactive model views reading as a combination of the bottom-up and the top-down processes, and assumes that when the readers read, they process the information from the print they are reading as well as the information from their background knowledge (Roe & Smith & Burns, 2005).
In the interactive process, reading is seen as an active and strategic process that allows the readers to use both of the bottom-up and the top-down processes to predicate, confirm and self-correct the means of words, sentences, and texts.
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Teaching Reading to Elementary Students in Taipei Teaching Reading Skills and Strategies
Readers comprehend a text with their existing background knowledge of the world as well as their linguistic knowledge. During the process of constructing meanings of the text, the readers use word recognition strategies and comprehension strategies to access the information supplied by the text (Roe, Smith & Burns, 2005).
However, insufficient linguistic input environment makes learning to read in English difficult for EFL elementary students. Hence, it is important for English teachers to provide students with reading instruction as well as diagnose the skill areas students experience difficulties with when they learn to read in English. Once students’ reading problems are identified, teachers can design reading tasks to help students practice the missing skills. For example, if students have troubles in dealing with unfamiliar words, phrases or sentences, it is probably because students have not yet developed the strategy of guessing the meaning from the context. Teachers should then describe and model the strategy, and guide students to practice the strategy independently or cooperatively with other students (Roe & Smith & Burns, 2005) until it becomes an automatic skill.
Using a Balanced Approach to Teaching Reading
As Brewster, Elli and Girard (2002) claimed that the most effective way of teaching reading to children means using a balanced approach to teaching the bottom-up reading skills to lower-grade students and the top-down reading skills the higher-grade students. Considering that EFL elementary students do not have many opportunities to practice their reading skills outside of the classroom, in this study, the
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teacher adopted the balanced approach to teaching reading to EFL elementary
fourth-grade students. In other words, the teacher taught both of the top-down and the bottom-up reading skills to the students. For example, the teacher offered the students reading materials such as dialogues or stories extracted from English textbooks or picture books and used pre-reading tasks such as picture walks to introduce the topic, characters and vocabulary related to the written texts to activate students' existing background knowledge. Then, the teacher taught the bottom-up reading skills and basic reading strategies to help students read and comprehend the texts.
Learning attitudes
Allport (1935) defined attitude as “a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (p. 810).
Based on this definition, attitudes are assumed to be private, formed and organized through individual’s life experience; and have a direct impact on individual’s behavior. Besides, attitudes are thought to comprise three components: affective which links with individual’s feelings, cognitive which refers to individual’s belief;
and conative which is behavioral (Schwarz & Bohner, 2001). The affective
component of attitudes, as described in Gardner's socio-educational model of second language acquisition, are the affective reactions towards learning a language.
According to Gardner (1985), the affective component influences learners' motivation in language learning. Presumably, creating a rich and supportive English learning environment to promote positive learning attitudes among students may enhance students' motivation in learning English. Also, Brown (2000) claimed that the positive
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proficiency. In other words, second language learners who possess positive attitudes towards the target language, the people who speak the target language and the target language culture may make more progress in the language they are learning than those who hold negative attitudes. From this perspective, English teachers may design some cultural learning activities and materials to help students learn English as well as understand and appreciate Western culture. It is believed that the cultural learning activities can promote EFL students’ positive feelings about learning English and encourage them to be more confident about their learning of English language.
Task-based Language Teaching and Learning Definitions of ‘a task’
The term ‘task’ is defined in many ways by the researchers (Long, 1985;
Richards, Platt & Weber, 1985; Cookes, 1986; Breen, 1989; Nunan, 1989; Skehan, 1996a; Lee, 2000; Bygate, Skehan, and Swain 2001). As the concept of ‘a task’ is interpreted differently in the research and pedagogic literature, there seems to be no agreement on ‘what a task is’. Ellis (2003) scrutinized the definitions of ‘tasks’, compared and analyzed their strands, and provided the following set of essential features of a task:
1. A task is a workplan.
2. A task involves a primary focus on meaning.
3. A task involves real-world processes of language use.
4. A task can involve any of the four language skills.
5. A task engages cognitive processes.
6. A task has a clearly defined communicative outcome.
(pp. 9-10)
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Ellis (2009) examined the research on task-based language teaching (TBLT) and emphasized that “there is no single task-based language teaching approach” (p. 221).
He explained that the advocates of TBLT including SLA researchers (Skehan, 1998a);
(Ellis, 2003), and teacher educators (Prabhu1987; Willis 1996; Nunan 2004) discuss the concept of ‘a task’ and ‘what consists of a task’ from different perspectives.
Accordingly, they describe the design and the use of tasks based on various
underlying principles. After reviewing the related research, Ellis (2009) proposed the following four criteria for considering a language teaching activity to be a task based on the six essential features of a task he suggested in 2003.
1. The primary focus should be on ‘meaning’.
2. There should be some kind of ‘gap’.
3. Learners should largely have to rely on their own resources.
4. There is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language.
(Ellis, 2009, p. 223)
According to Ellis (2009), the above four criteria can be used to differentiate ‘a task’ from a teaching activity. For example, “a situational grammar exercise” (p. 224) may look similar to a task, but it is not a task. The focus of the grammar exercise is on the form, not the meaning, and the purpose of the exercise is to have learners practice the use of accurate linguistic forms.
As it comes to the design and implementation of tasks with children, Cameron (2001) pointed out the following features of tasks.
1. Tasks have ‘coherence and unity for learners’. When teachers introduce tasks to students, each step of the task, starting from the topic, activity to the outcome of the
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task, must be consistent and clear to students. Coherent and clear explanations of the task procedure help students understand what they will be doing and how to do it.
2. The meaning and purpose of doing a task must be clearly explained to children.
Knowing the reason for doing a task can engage students in their learning.
3. The language-learning goals must be explicitly explained to children. Let students know that there are a beginning and an end in a task.
To help children conduct a task smoothly, teachers need to keep these features in mind, and carefully introduce the task and the task procedure to children.
As Ellis (2000) claimed, tasks are defined and used differently in different contexts. Carless (2007) suggested that tasks as well as task-based language teaching should be carefully defined and applied in public school contexts. As this study was conducted in an EFL public elementary school context where students rarely had opportunities to use English outside of the classroom, the present study adopted Nunan's (1989) definition of a task which considers ‘a task’ a ‘piece of classroom work.’ Nunan (1989) defined the task as:
A piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right. (p. 10)
More specifically, this study followed Nunan’s definitions of pedagogical tasks.
Pedagogical tasks are conducted in the language classrooms; they are different from the ordinary classroom activities and exercises of which the main focuses are the
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practice of the language form. According to Nunan (2004), pedagogical tasks especially the ones with activation rational encourage students to activate as well as use their linguistic knowledge to communicate with others, the “communicative involvement in this kind of pedagogical tasks is the necessary and sufficient condition for successful second language acquisition” (p. 21).
Theories of Task-based Language Teaching and Learning
As Skehan (1998) claimed that “meaning is primary” in TBLT approach, language is viewed as a means of making meaning, not a set of displayed forms.
Language is introduced to learners based on three models of language - structural, functional and interactional models, which underlie the planning of task-based instruction (Richard, 2001). For example, Skehan (1998) described language as
‘less-to-more’ complex in terms of the language structure and employed ‘structural criteria’ for deciding the linguistic complexity of tasks. Foster and Skehan (1996) proposed a three-way functional distinction of tasks including personal, narrative and decision-making tasks. Pica (1994) classified the interactional model into interactional activity and communicative goal.
It is believed that task-based language teaching (TBLT) is linked to the above language models, TBLT is motivated by a theory of learning (Richards & Rodgers, 2001) and TBLT draws on the nature of a language. For instance, Skehan’s view of the linguistic complexity and the function of language help us understand why the design of ‘tasks’ is sequenced from less-to-more difficult in a task-based syllabus, and why TBLT emphasizes the use of purposeful tasks which reflects learners’ needs in real life.
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Richards and Rodgers (2001) summarized the learning principles of TBLT as follows: ‘Tasks’ play a very important role in the language acquisition process.
‘Tasks’ provide adequate opportunities for both input and output requirements, especially the process of “negotiation of meaning” (p. 228). When learners try to negotiate meanings, they monitor their use of the language and modify their language accordingly. This view explains why some ‘tasks’ are designed to facilitate the use and learning of particular aspects of language. Besides, TBLT is based on the assumption that language learners can learn better by working with other learners to complete a task. It is believed that the use of authentic language; and the interaction with others which occurs during the process can motivate learners to learn and enhance their language learning process (Larsen-Freeman, 2000).
Task-Based Language Teaching as an Approach
According to Richards and Rogers (2001), task-based language teaching refers to an approach, which considers ‘task’ as a central unit for planning and teaching.
Nunan (2004) described the relationship between TBLT and CLT as follows:
Communicative language teaching (CLT) is a broad and philosophical approach to the language curriculum, and that task-based language and teaching (TBLT) puts it into practice. While CLT is considered as a more general and theoretical teaching approach which emphasizes the importance of interaction and communication in language learning, TBLT realizes it and puts it to good use in terms of syllabus design and teaching method.
Bygate, Skehan, and Swain (2001) pointed out that “definitions of a task will need to differ according to the purposes for which tasks are used” (p. 11). Accordingly, the design of tasks will also need to be adjusted to achieve the meaning and the
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purposes of the tasks. In a similar vein, Ellis (2009) claimed that “there is no single way of doing TBLT” (p. 224). He further pointed out the following important concepts for doing task-based language teaching.
1. Tasks can be unfocused; unfocused tasks are designed to ask learners to use the target language to communicate in general situations. Tasks can also be focused;
focused tasks are designed to ask learners to use some specific linguistic forms such as particular sentence patterns to communicate with others. When conducting a task whether it is unfocused or focused, the learners should know that the main purpose of the learning activity is to get the meanings of messages across to obtain or convey some information or to express their ideas. The learners have to use their linguistic resources such as their target language skills and their non-linguistic resources such as body language to complete the activity and to achieve the outcome.
2. The task used in task-supported language teaching involves a
presentation-practice-production teaching procedure and incorporates a ‘task’ at the final production stage. Ellis (2009) viewed this type of task a “situational grammar exercise” (P. 224), which is used to help learners reinforce the language patterns they have learned. Depending on how this kind of task-based language teaching is
designed and operated, as long as it can engage learners in the use of the target language, it still has its place in language teaching. According to Littlewood (1981), the focus on form activities such as a situational grammar exercise provides learners with opportunities to develop their language skills and learning strategies so as to
designed and operated, as long as it can engage learners in the use of the target language, it still has its place in language teaching. According to Littlewood (1981), the focus on form activities such as a situational grammar exercise provides learners with opportunities to develop their language skills and learning strategies so as to