30.1869, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition: Bygate (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1869. Thu May 02 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1869, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition: Bygate (2018)

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Date: Thu, 02 May 2019 22:07:03
From: Ann DeVault [devaultann at gmail.com]
Subject: Learning Language through Task Repetition

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-4088.html

EDITOR: Martin  Bygate
TITLE: Learning Language through Task Repetition
SERIES TITLE: Task-Based Language Teaching 11
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Ann DeVault, University of Iowa

SUMMARY

Learning Language Through Task Repetition, edited by Martin Bygate, is Volume
11 of John Benjamins’s Task-Based Language Teaching: Issues, Research and
Practice (TBLT) series.  In the preface, the series editors state that the
book “is provocative for researchers and practitioners interested in the many
nuances of TBLT” with the aim of inspiring future work (p. ix).  The book
contains an introduction by Bygate as well as 12 chapters, which include two
invited theoretical pieces and ten chapters based on empirical work.    

Bygate’s Introduction begins by describing and defining the construct of task
repetition and situating task repetition research within TBLT.  There is then
a brief review of early research, followed by the potential significance of
task repetition for language teaching, and, lastly, an overview of the volume.
Bygate argues that traditional TBLT research has not investigated the
repetition of tasks, yet task repetition has the potential to promote the
gradual integration of various dimensions of language knowledge and it offers
a way to bring a focus-on-form into TBLT as learners and teachers review
aspects of the task and necessary language from one iteration to the next. 
Thus, the book is a call for tasks to be used over time as the focal point of
lessons; this allows for a dual focus on the task itself and the relevant
language.

“Task repetition for language learning: A perspective from skill acquisition
theory”, written by Robert DeKeyser, is a think-piece that offers a look at
task repetition in second language (L2) learning from the point of view of
skill acquisition theory and other areas of psychology.  As such, the chapter
provides a brief presentation of core concepts in skill acquisition theory and
how they relate to second language acquisition (SLA).  This includes a
treatment of declarative and procedural knowledge as well as rapid and slow
learning mechanisms.  DeKeyser then elucidates contributions from other areas
of cognitive psychology to the understanding of the effects of task repetition
by describing distribution of repeated practice as it relates to the spacing
issue, the interleaving issue, and degrees of similarity in task repetition. 
The next section of the chapter explains contributions of SLA research on
these same topics as well as a comparison between SLA findings and those from
psychology.  This SLA theory section also includes a discussion of transfer
and transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) from both psychological and SLA
research.  The chapter concludes with a call for more SLA research on the
effects of task repetition, especially with a focus on differences in
automatization with domain of language, differences in distribution of
practice whether the knowledge practiced is declarative or procedural, and how
research can help find the ideal context for bringing about transfer from one
task to another. 

Chapters 2-7 report research findings based on cognitive theories with
chapters 2-4 relating to language performance and Chapters 5-7 investigating
the impact of implementation factors.  The  cognitively-based chapters
repeatedly reference Levelt’s (1989, 1999) model of oral production and use it
as a structure for the research.  In Chapter 2, Nel de Jong and Philip
Tillman, report on a study of 39 adult ESL speakers who completed repeated
retellings of picture stories with one group completing the retellings under
increasing time pressure and the other with a constant time limit.  The
research questions concerned the extent to which immediate task repetition
with the same content leads to re-use of words and grammatical structures
under both constant and variable time constraints as well as the correlation
between the re-use of words and grammatical structures and fluency.  The
chapter contains an explanation of cosine similarity with term
frequency-inverse document frequency weighting (tf-idf) as well as an in-depth
explanation of n-grams.  In terms of analysis, similarity between pairs of
iterations was calculated as cosine similarity with weighting for tf-idf. 
Similarity was analyzed based on lexical unigrams, lexical trigrams, and
part-of-speech trigrams.  Fluency was evaluated by the proportion of time
filled with speech as well as mean syllable duration.  Results suggested that:
immediate task repetition of picture storytelling elicits re-use not only at
the word level, but also above word level; a decrease in available time did
not affect re-use; there was more re-use elicited by the third rather than by
the second iteration; and similarity did not correlate with fluency. 

“The effects of task repetition and task complexity on L2 lexicon use”, by
Kim, Crossley, Jung, Kyle, and Kang, examined how different task repetition
conditions (procedural repetition and exact task repetition) and task
complexity affect learners’ use of sophisticated lexical items in terms of
word familiarity, word age of acquisition, and word frequency.  The study
involved four middle school English classes in South Korea (n = 73) in which
the classes were randomly assigned to one of four groups: simple task with
exact task repetition; simple task with procedural repetition; complex task
with exact task repetition; and complex task with procedural repetition.  For
all groups, pairs of students completed three collaborative,
information-exchange tasks over three days. Data analysis was separated into a
section related to natural language processing tools and one on statistical
analysis.  The results section was structured by the three indices of lexical
sophistication (word familiarity, word age of acquisition, and word
frequency).  The results suggested that as learners repeat tasks, they use
less familiar words with a higher age of acquisition and that task complexity
is a mediating factor between repetition and vocabulary use.

In Chapter 4, “Discourse performance in L2 task repetition”, Zhan Wang and
Gaowei Chen investigate the impact of immediate, exact task repetition on
learners’ speech at the discourse level in terms of quantity of discourse,
cohesion, and quality of lexis.  The study involved 13 undergraduate students
at a Hong Kong university performing an immediate, exact task repetition in
English.  The participants completed a video-based narrative task in which
they provided running commentary for a silent, five-minute Mr. Bean video,
which they narrated twice, back-to-back.  The authors compared the first and
second speech performances on 13 measures related to discourse quantity,
cohesion, and lexical quality using the Computerized Propositional Idea
Density Rater and Coh-Metrix.  Data were analyzed using a related-samples
Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test.  Results suggested that performing immediate, exact
task repetition resulted in enhanced discourse performance in terms of
increased quantity of discourse, increased cohesion, and increased quality of
lexis.

Chapters 5-7 use cognitive theories to investigate the impact of various
implementation factors.  In Chapter 5, Scott Aubrey expands his previous study
(Aubrey, 2017) to include transcripts of repeated task performances, which
were analyzed for the effect of intra-cultural and inter-cultural task
repetition on learners’ attention to linguistic form.  Task interactions
between interlocutors were analyzed in terms of language-related episodes
(LREs) in which each LRE was coded based on four characteristics: linguistic
focus (lexical, grammatical, spelling/pronunciation, other); type (reactive,
preemptive); complexity (simple, complex); and resolution (resolved with
uptake, resolved without uptake, incorrectly resolved, unresolved).  In the
study, five two-way information exchange tasks followed by a decision-making
component were performed by dyads of students in an intensive English program
at a Japanese university. Japanese students were paired with another Japanese
student in their class for the first five weeks/activities, there was a
one-week break, and the same five tasks were repeated, but this time with
either another student in the class (intra-cultural condition) or with an
international student (inter-cultural condition).  A unique component was the
inclusion of a pre-task activity two days prior to the task, in which students
gathered information related to the task and completed a task research
worksheet.  Results indicated that repeating tasks with a non-Japanese
interlocutor led to significant benefits in terms of a higher incidence of
LREs overall, more episodes being resolved with uptake, and a higher rate of
complex and grammatical LREs than during the first task performance. 
Repetition with a Japanese interlocutor resulted in no significant change in
LRE production, but a significant decrease in the production of lexical LREs. 

In Chapter 6, Xingchao Hu investigated the implementation factors of task
type, task-type repetition, and performance criteria on oral production in
terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency.  It was based on limited
processing capacity theory and the concept of grounding criteria (though
applying this to a cognitive approach rather than sociocultural or
collaborative theory).  One hundred forty-four, first-year undergraduate
students from a Chinese university were randomly paired and assigned to either
a map task or a picture-story task. Each task type group was then subdivided
into high-performance criteria, low-performance criteria, and control groups.
The high-performance speakers undertook a more demanding post-task activity,
the low-performance speakers completed a less demanding post-task activity,
and the control group did not complete a post-task activity. Each dyad
completed a warm-up task and then was assigned the first experimental task.  A
week later, the pairs met again and another experimental task of the same type
as the first, but with different content was completed.  Results of the study
suggested that tasks with limited communicational goals gave rise to greater
accuracy and fluency, whereas tasks with more demanding functional
requirements led to increased complexity.  In terms of task-type repetition,
the findings suggested repeating a similar task with different content may
promote accuracy and fluency, but not complexity.  Lastly, the
high-performance criterion seemed to yield greater complexity and fluency, but
not accuracy in the tasks implemented in this study.  

Chris Sheppard and Rod Ellis’s Chapter 7 compares the effects of task
repetition on oral language production in both a repeated task and a new task
in groups with and without a between-task intervention involving stimulated
recall. The authors investigate the effects of task repetition and
between-task intervention on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of oral
production. The authors additionally reference the nature and role of working
memory as well as the Transfer Appropriate Processing Hypothesis (Lightbown,
2008) to support their research hypotheses and the study design. The
implementation factor of interest in this chapter was the stimulated recall
intervention that one group of participants completed between the first and
second iteration of a picture story task.  For the study, all 40 Japanese
university student participants completed the same 10-frame picture story task
three times and then performed the same picture story task, but with different
content for the Time 4 task.  The individuals in the Stimulated Recall group
completed the task once, followed by the stimulated recall procedure, and then
the second iteration of the task.  After a two-week interval, the participants
completed the original task a third time, immediately followed by a new
10-frame picture task.  The Task Repetition group followed the same procedure
minus the stimulated recall.  In analyzing the transcripts, the authors
measured grammatical complexity by phrases per t-unit, accuracy as percentage
of error-free clauses, and fluency in terms of pruned words per minute.  The
results of the study identified no effect of stimulated recall on the
performance of the same task in complexity or accuracy.  Both groups improved
in fluency from Time 1 to Time 2, but the Stimulated Recall Group produced
significantly more pruned words per minute at Time 2 compared to Time 1 than
the Repetition Group.  In terms of effects of stimulated recall on the
performance of the new task, there was no effect on complexity and both groups
demonstrated lower accuracy in Task 4 than in Task 1.  There were significant
increases in speech rate for both groups from Time 1 to Time 4, however the
Task Repetition group maintained its level of fluency from Time 3 to Time 4
whereas the Stimulated Recall group lost previous gains in fluency.  

The subsequent three chapters (8-10) draw on sociocultural frameworks. In
Chapter 8, Tony Lynch reports his previous research into four types of oral
communication tasks, each featuring a form of enhanced repetition, contrasts
the findings with those from a recent replication study, and then proposes a
model of task recycling that incorporates the use of reflection activities,
feedback, and comparator recordings to help L2 learners recycle and enhance
their spoken English.  The crux of the chapter is the use of enhanced
repetition, which involves engaging in a cognitive activity between task
repetitions.  These cognitive activities include peer or instructor feedback,
revision of a transcript of one’s spoken output, and listening to or watching
a comparator recording.  Studies related to four different speaking tasks
(Free Talk, Poster Carousel, Conference Presentation, and Scenario) were
discussed as well as a replication of the Poster Carousel task, which resulted
in contrasting results.  Four of the five studies had findings of increased
accuracy, complexity, and fluency of learners’ English on subsequent
performance of a task and the various forms of enhancement built into the
tasks created a context in which learners did not perceive the second round of
performance as repetition.  The chapter concluded with a model for maximizing
the benefits of enhanced repetition.

In Chapter 9, Emi Kobayashi and Masaki Kobayashi presented an ethnographic
multiple-case study based upon sociocultural and ecological perspectives to
highlight the interpersonal processes that contributed to Japanese
undergraduate EFL learners’ language learning through a poster carousel. The
study measured not only actual task performances, but also the collaborative
interactions in which the learners engaged with their audience and partners. 
The chapter referenced an extensive theoretical framework including Vygotsky,
language socialization, Gee’s Discourses, van Lier’s (2004)
ecological-semiotic perspective, Gibson’s (1979) notion of affordance,
languaging (Swain, 2006), Coughlan and Duff’s (1994) distinction between
“task” and “activity”; “appropriation” derived from Bakhtin’s dialogism, and
Goffman’s (1959) theatrical metaphor distinction between front stage and back
stage.  In the study, students gave three  15-minute presentations on the same
topic each followed by a 5-minute question-answer session.  Students’
task-related classroom discourse from the three presentations and
question-answer sessions and the presenters’ backstage interactions between
rounds were analyzed using an ethnography of communication approach to examine
communicative patterns and identify tracers to track students’ learning across
task-related events.  The researchers found that task repetition provided the
presenters with multiple opportunities for languaging in the form of
collaborative dialogue and audience feedback, especially teacher feedback. In
the process, the participants’ primary focus shifted from meaning to form. 
Also, results suggested that student agency plays an important role, as some
participants used these partner and audience comments to change their
subsequent presentations, yet others did not.

In Chapter 10, Natsuko Shintani also examined task repetition from a
sociocultural perspective, but within an Activity Theory framework.  Two
aspects differentiated this study from the others in this book: it involved an
input task and the participants were six-year-olds rather than adults. 
Shintani researched how the dynamics of teacher-student interaction changed
when the same task was repeated over time using the same listen-and-do task
nine times over five weeks.  Analysis showed that in the early lessons, the
teacher focused on mediating the learners’ completion of the task, but in
later lessons, the teacher’s focus shifted to pushing students to
self-regulate in performing the tasks, which led to a change in the nature of
the activity itself.  Additionally, data suggested that the construction of
zones of proximal development was a collaborative endeavor not only between
teacher and students, but also among the students themselves.

The last two chapters drew on Complex/Dynamic Systems Theory.  In Chapter 11,
Ryo Nitta and Kyoko Baba reported on a classroom-based study aimed at
exploring task-as-affordance by researching changes in L2 writing and
self-regulatory processes through writing task repetition over an academic
year. For the writing task, students were given a list of three topics and
wrote a composition in English on a topic of their choice for 10 minutes
followed by a self-reflection.  Each chosen topic was used for two consecutive
weeks (exact repetition) and then a different topic was chosen for the next
two weeks (procedural repetition).  This lasted for the 30 weeks of the
academic year.  The authors used a case-based method focused on two Japanese
university students who were distinctive in terms of their English writing and
self-reflective comments. L2 compositions were analyzed in terms of the
patterns and complexity of language using fluency, syntactic, and lexical
measures as well as qualitative changes in writing .  The students’ degree of
task engagement was analyzed using the number of Japanese characters in the
writing reflection sheets as well as identifying the self-regulatory processes
represented in their self-reflection in terms of goal-setting,
self-observation, and self-evaluation.  The authors concluded that repeated
encounters with tasks over extended periods created a valuable pedagogic
environment likely to push learners into language learning, but only when they
were actively engaged. 

As a bookend to the cognitively-oriented think piece in Chapter 1, Diane
Larsen-Freeman’s contribution in Chapter 12 was a theoretical piece advocating
for a different understanding of task repetition from the perspective of
Complex/Dynamic Systems Theory.  From this orientation, task repetition gives
learners opportunities to construct new patterns and to build language
capacity rather than merely to repeat the language used in previous encounters
with a task.  She suggested the term “iteration” rather than “repetition”
because it is a better reflection of the fact that there is never exact
replication when a task is used repeatedly. Larsen-Freeman explained how
slightly altering and iterating tasks-as-workplans can help with adaptation. 
She also suggested the use of the term “transformation” rather than “transfer”
to better capture the idea that learners transform what they have learned
rather than merely transporting their knowledge intact.  The chapter also
problematized the measures commonly used in TBLT studies and suggested the use
of more socially-oriented measures of development and a consideration of a
nonlinear or longer-term relationship between a learner’s iterative
performance and improvement in the language.

EVALUATION

The book is organized logically with the two think-pieces as bookends with
empirical work in the middle.  The organization from cognitive to
sociocultural to complex dynamic systems theory makes for logical groupings of
chapters, and this combination of theoretical frameworks and methodologies
within a single volume highlights the breadth of research on task repetition,
which is important when creating a first collection on the topic.  Each
chapter begins with an abstract, which aids the reader in sifting through the
chapters and deciding which are most relevant to them.  Throughout the volume,
the authors consistently discuss the implications of their findings,
pedagogical applications, as well as areas for future research.

The individual chapters were well-organized, clearly written, and presented
quality research. The exceptions being Chapters Two and Four.  In Wang and
Chen’s chapter, the literature review was sparse and some subsections were
short and would have benefitted from being expanded or combined.  The authors
also mentioned an interview and questionnaire for which no data are reported
and there was no apparent connection between these pieces of data and the
research questions.  Similarly, the chapter written by de Jong and Tillman was
not as strong in organization as the other chapters.  For instance, there was
a page-long explanation of the Jaccard Index and its strengths and
limitations, yet this index was not used in the study.  Both chapters also
lacked sufficient support for the conclusions made based on statistically
inconclusive findings and contradictory results.

The layout of the volume is appealing overall.  There are full-color tables,
figures, and charts throughout the book, which create a pleasing visual
experience, although a few of the tables lack labels on the axes, which can
make them difficult to understand in isolation.  The only distracting
formatting  was in Nitta and Baba’s chapter in which there were gaps at the
bottom of several pages seemingly based on the placement of tables. 
Additionally, there were a few typographical errors, including substantive
errors such as using “inter-cultural” rather than “intra-cultural”. These
errors were distracting, though overall did not interfere with understanding.

As can be expected in a book with an introduction as well as 12 chapters all
related to a single, rather specialized topic, the literature reviews
throughout the book are quite similar and repeatedly reference the same
language acquisition theories and research findings.  A benefit of this
repetition is that a reader need not read the book cover to cover in order to
have an understanding of task-repetition.  Individual chapters can stand
alone.  If the reader is interested in the most thorough, that by Sheppard and
Ellis in Chapter 7 is the clearest and most comprehensive outside of Bygate’s
introductory chapter.  Either of those chapters would serve well as readings
for a TBLT unit in a graduate course on SLA.  While the series editors suggest
the book for both researchers and practitioners, it may not be accessible to
practitioners unless they are also researchers or quite familiar with SLA
theory and research.

An additional consideration is the lack of variety in participants and
contexts in the studies reported in this volume.  All studies involved
learners of English with nine studies involving EFL settings and one in an ESL
setting.  In terms of learning context, the studies were mostly homogenous as
well.  All but two studies (Shintani’s and Kim, et al.’s) involved university
students and the participants were predominantly L1 speakers of Asian
languages with one study in South Korea, one in Hong Kong, five in Japan, and
one with Chinese learners.  The exceptions are de Jong and Tillman’s study in
the United States and Lynch’s in Scotland and the Netherlands.

Overall, this volume is a through treatment of task repetition that helps move
forward the discussion of the role and potential value of task repetition in a
TBLT framework.

REFERENCES

Aubrey, Scott. (2017). Inter-cultural contact and flow in a task-based
Japanese EFL classroom. Language Teaching Research. 21(6). 717-734.

Coughlan, Peter & Patricia A. Duff. 1994. Same task, different activities:
Analysis of a SLA task from an activity theory perspective. In James P.
Lantolf & Gabriela Appel (eds.), Vygotskian approaches to second language
research, 173-193. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Gibson, James J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York:
Anchor Books.

Levelt, Willem J.M. 1989. Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.

Levelt, Willem J.M. 1999. Producing spoken language: A blueprint of the
speaker. In Colin Brown & Peter Hagoort (eds.), The neurocognition of
language, 83-122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lier, Leo van. 2004. The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A
sociological perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Lightbown, Patsy 2008. Transfer appropriate processing as a model for
classroom second language acquisition. In ZhaoHong Han (ed.), Understanding
second language process, 27-44. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Swain, Merrill 2006. Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second
language proficiency. In Heidi Byrnes (ed.), Advanced second language
learning: The contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, 95-108. New York:
Continuum.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ann DeVault, a former high school Spanish teacher, is a PhD. candidate at the
University of Iowa researching language learning by individuals with
disabilities and also serves as an instructor and field supervisor in the
foreign language teacher education program at the university.





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