Making good tasks better: Fundamental concerns

This paper deals with the fundamental issues to be considered in task design within a communicative framework. It starts with examining the definitions of task in order to come up with a more comprehensive one for tasks deign purposes. It is argued that making informed decisions in task analysis, selection, and design, in addition to merging of its psycholinguistic and communicative rationales, requires accounting for its pedagogical and educational values beyond the standardized language classroom. This issue has not been seriously considered in task design. Accordingly, aspects of the pedagogical and educational value of tasks as an important task design issue is discussed through two sample tasks and raising several key questions with regard to each. These questions relate to the extent to which a task has educational values beyond language learning, degree of learner involvement and personal contribution, the origin of the task-related ideas, teacher/learner roles, meaningful and purposeful language, task staging, and finally the extent to which task performance can create a unique rather than a standardized classroom.