4. Amount and type of help given
5. Role of teachers and learners
6. Time allowed
7. Motivation
8. Confidence
9. Learning styles
This list illustrates the difficulty of operationalizing the notion of task difficulty: One could
add almost anything to it, such as time of day, room temperature, or the after effects of
breakfast.
Types of learning and teaching activities
We have seen that there are many different views as to what constitutes a task. Consequently,
there are many competing descriptions of basic task types in 113LT and of appropriate
classroom activities. Breen gives a very broad description of a task (1987: 26):
A language learning task can be regarded as a springboard for learning work. In a broad
sense, it is a structured plan for the provision of opportunities for the refinement of
knowledge and capabilities entailed in a new language and its use during
communication. Such a work plan will have its own particular objective, appropriate
content which is to be worked upon, and a working procedure. . . . A simple and brief
exercise is a task, and so also are more complex and comprehensive work plans which
require spontaneous communication of meaning or the solving of problems in learning
and communicating. Any language test can be included within this spectrum of tasks.
All materials designed for language teaching — through their particular organization of
content and the working procedures they assume or propose for the learning of content
— can be seen as compendia of tasks.
For Prabhu, a task is "an activity which requires learners to arrive at an outcome from given
information through some process of thought, and which allows teachers to control and
regulate that process" (Prabhu 1987: 17). Reading train timetables and deciding which train
one should take to get to a certain destination on a given day is an appropriate classroom task
according to this definition. Crookes defines a task as "a piece of work or an activity, usually
with a specified objective, undertaken as part of an educational course, at work, or used to
elicit data for research" (Crookes 1986: 1). This definition would lead to a very different set
of "tasks" from those identified by Prabhu, since it could include not only summaries, essays,
and class notes, but presumably, in some language classrooms; drills, dialogue readings; and
any of the other "tasks" that teachers use to attain their teaching objectives.