Automating task design for second language teaching – an SLB workshop

Description

This workshop will be presented by professor Roger Gilabert of the University of Barcelona. In addition to lecturing on Second Language Acquisition and related topics at the university, and publishing widely, Roger is a guest tutor on SLB’s Task-Based Language Teaching course which begins on January 19th 2024. For more information about Roger’s work, see here.

In Roger’s words:

The goal of this workshop is to present a web-based tool (taskGen) developed at the University of Barcelona that assists and trains second/foreign language teachers during task design. While some teachers may have received training into task-based language learning and teaching, when it comes to task design they are often left to their own resources. The tool brings together 3 decades of research into task-based methodological and pedagogical principles, knowledge about natural language processing, interaction design, and teacher cognition in order to make task design easy, manageable, and easy to share with others. The tool also automates focus on form in texts by automatically detecting linguistic features, and applying input enhancement techniques (bolding, coloring or font sizes). The paper will present the most basic functions of the program, like creating pre-tasks, tasks, and post-tasks, as well as some of the most important features of the tool. The tool has been designed for all kinds of educational contexts (primary school, secondary school, university, private tutoring) and perspectives (CLIL, TBLT, PBL, ESP, EAP, EMI, and private tutoring). In this workshop you’ll see examples of tasks designed with the tool as well as get hand-on experience to design your own tasks. Please bring a communicative task you have already designed or an idea for one, and we’ll build it together.