| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This paper attempts to establish a psychological framework for evaluating tasks, and simultaneously seeks a way of enhancing task-based approaches to L2 learning. It is indicated that simply engaging learners in communication tasks may engender a performance-oriented approach to language processing, and induce them to by-pass the underlying language system, with the likely result being the promotion of fluency and strategic competence at the expense of the development of the IL system. This paper then suggests that regulating cognitive demands of tasks, namely the demands which those tasks place on learners' cognitive capacity in creating the meanings which need to be expressed for the achievement of the tasks, may be one way of avoiding such danger inherent in task-based approaches, because learners, when required to pay less attention to handling those non-linguistic demands, will have more cognitive capacity to be devoted to attending to linguistic features of input and output This paper then proposes a tentative framework within which those cognitive demands may be properly assessed and effectively controlled. Through exploiting particular pedagogic tasks, the paper presents various criteria for assessing a task's level of cognitive demands (e.g. the degree of abstractions which that task requires learners to make, and the range of meanings which the task allows learners to express), and also demonstrates practical ways of controlling those demands.
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