Teacher Input & Types of Tasks in the Classroom
Prof. Bowles is leading a project on instructed second language acquisition with children learning Spanish at the Language Academy.
This study focuses on teacher input in our kindergarten/first-grade Spanish class and seeks to describe the range and frequency of task types used in the class (e.g., games, songs, routines, group reading) and to further describe the teacher input associated with the different task types both in terms of quantity and quality (lexical and syntactic complexity). Results will contribute to a growing base of research on Task-based language teaching in child second/foreign language classrooms and down the road will enable us to link characteristics of the classroom input and acquisition profiles.
Bowles, M., Montrul, S., Dias, R., and Morales, A. Teacher input and task types in an authentic primary school Spanish class in the US. Sixth International Conference on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT 2015). Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, September 16-18, 2015.