What does it mean to prepare for a task?

Some classroom activities are complicated. Just imagine the steps that a student has to go through in order to complete something ‘simple’ like a role-playing activity.

They might need to read and understand a prompt, come up with ideas of what to say, then figure out how to say them, then negotiate a situation with another learner (who usually has a different set of information), all to try to reach a reasonable conclusion or achieve a goal they’ve been set.

Because of this, we often ask learners to ‘prepare’ for the activities that they are going to do in the lesson. However, this is a stage which, in my experience both teaching and observing teachers, is often underexplored in many lessons. This begs the question: what can we do to help learners prepare to complete an activity?

When preparing to do a new activity, especially one which is unfamiliar to you, it helps to see an example. It would be quite hard to dance tango if you’d never seen a single dance before, regardless of how good your teacher was! 

Additionally, these are very convenient for materials writers to include in coursebooks, so, especially with modern coursebooks, you will likely see models of activities before larger or more complicated tasks that the students need to do.

You might also consider the quality of the models — do you want all of them to be ‘good’ models, or do you want to compare and contrast features of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ models? Do you want all of them to be the same register, or should some be more formal and some more casual? The answer to this likely depends on your particular lesson aims.

Additionally, models don’t have to come from the coursebook or from ‘native-like’ or ‘proficient’ speakers. Another source of model texts can be the students themselves. 

Many exam preparation coursebooks and materials make use of student examples of doing exam tasks rather than ‘native’ or ‘proficient’ speaker examples because students' examples are often more accessible to and easier to understand for learners.

Because we are language teachers, this is likely the first place that many teachers look when they think about what kind of support to provide learners when starting an activity. But how do we know what kind of language to revise or teach in order to help learners?

One way of doing this is to do the task yourself and analyse the language that you used to complete it. Take the following activity from an A1-A2 level YL class I taught recently:

I produced the following:

We can see some areas of language that may be necessary for learners to know to be able to produce something similar:

Or, if we wanted to focus on the task itself, we might identify some useful ‘chunks’ in the model text and choose these to highlight, such as:

This might be a good way to go if the students have already studied or are already able to use the language areas identified earlier.

However, this all refers to teacher-selected language. It’s also possible for learners to choose or decide what language they might need, for example by:

Students may also need ideas that they can talk about. Sometimes, the ideas are indicated on the materials themselves, as we saw in the last section. However, a more open-ended task that gives more freedom to students may also require them to be a bit more creative.

It’s also helpful for the students to work in small groups to generate more ideas, although some individual planning time can be beneficial for students who prefer to think before they speak (as opposed to our more extroverted learners who may think better while they speak). 

After this, combine the pairs to a small group (e.g. 4 students) and ask them to share their best ideas, and repeat until you have the best ideas generated by the whole class.

Finally, students can benefit from opportunities to rehearse what they are going to do, either with a partner or ‘internally’ through visualisation. In my experience observing teachers, this is the least common type of preparation I observe, yet usually has the potential to be one of the most helpful.

We also know that during task performance, there can also be a connection, and students who have an internal monologue which is overly self-critical tend to perform worse in tasks.

Underhill, A. in ‘Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation’ suggests another activity for helping learners with a particular feature of pronunciation before a task starts (e.g. polite intonation), is to first play an audio track / provide a model containing the target feature, and then ask Ss to ‘play it back’ in their heads over and over, in their own voice. Then, ask learners to repeat silently, and then quietly, and then out loud.

Visualisation can also be an important component, especially for tasks which require students to take certain speech acts which they might be uncomfortable taking, such as interruption. 

Imagine that a group of students is preparing for a task where they need to work in large groups (6-8 students) and participate in a meeting, like the kind you have at work. A useful visualisation activity could be the following:

While this might sound a bit ‘new-agey’ or ‘weird’, visualisation has a long history of use with participants ranging from patients undergoing therapy to professional athletes and cage fighters, and often shows great results. 

Moreover, learners may encounter problems when completing tasks that have nothing to do with their level of proficiency in L2 — such as being hesitant or shy to interrupt — which visualisation may help address, and there is some research to show that visualisation can have a positive impact on learners’ willingness to engage with classroom activities.

Some of these may be included into tasks themselves (i.e. in a role-play for returning a product, the goal could be ‘get the customer service agent to agree to a refund’) as an outcome-based goal, or they could be more language-based goals, especially at higher levels (i.e. in the same role-play, ‘I’m going to use emphatic pronunciation to show that I mean business’ or ‘I’m going to use more third conditional structures to show that it was the company’s fault, not mine!’). 

Having clear goals gives students something to focus on, and helps to make their language practice more intentional, often resulting in better learning.

Sometimes, the most important element of preparing for a task is simply having a quiet space to prepare yourself. Preparation is at its core a thinking activity, and even the performance stage of a task is as much a thinking activity as it is a social activity. 

One example of ‘productive’ silence is to let learners have ‘paper conversations’ before starting a task involving discussion or dialogue. Here, learners perform the same speaking task that they would normally complete, except they do so by passing a sheet of paper back and forth (or, in online lessons, writing in the chat) and writing their ‘conversation’ there. 

This helps to remove the time-based pressures of spoken communication and gives the learners more time to think, see the language that they’re using, and possibly even correct mistakes or take conscious steps to incorporate new language, especially if prompted to do so.

The preparation stage of any activity is often a critical step where teachers can positively influence the outcome of the activity and help students greatly, and, because of this, it’s important to think carefully about it while planning lessons. 

This article is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the possibilities which teachers can use while preparing learners, but rather as a starting point from which to build off of and develop further. However, there are a few final points to bear in mind regarding task preparation: