Page 206 - Beyond Methods

194 Activating intuitive heuristics
on meaning excludes it” (Doughty and Williams, 1998, p. 4, all ital- ics as in original).
The basic principles of focus on form can be implemented through any of the communicative activities that make the learners preoccupied with meaning rather than form. These activities in- clude attending a job interview, making an airline reservation, read- ing a journal abstract, writing a lab report, or locating a book in the library. To give a specific activity suggested by Long and Robinson, (1998, pp. 24 – 5), learners may be asked to work in pairs or in small groups on a problem-solving task that requires them to collect and synthesize information on economic growth in Japan. They may be required to read published reports on economic trends for different sectors of the Japanese economy.
Long and Robinson point out that, in doing this task on econ- omy, learners are likely to come across terms such as rose, fell, grew, sank, plummeted, increased, decreased, declined, doubled, deteriorated, and exceeded. The frequent occurrence of these lexi- cal items in the input makes them salient, and so increases the like- lihood of being noticed by learners. A subsequent speaking or writ- ing task may encourage the learners to incorporate them in their speech or writing. Certain grammatical items can be dealt with in an appropriate manner if there is an expressed need for it.
Reflective task 8.8
Are pedagogic tasks designable and doable in your specific learning and teaching context? If not, and if you wish to design them and use them, how can you make use of the resources (however limited they are) you may al- ready have at your disposal?
To sum up this section, it is fair to assume from the above dis- cussion that grammar tasks and pedagogic tasks offer two comple- mentary types of input enhancement. Together, they can help teach- ers to meet the needs of learners with different learning styles and learning purposes. They carry the potential to assist teachers in their attempt to activate their intuitive heuristics by raising learn- ers’ awareness of linguistic features and language use. Gliding com- fortably along the inductive-deductive continuum, they offer sev-