CLARIFYING CONCEPTS

TASK:
1. A task is the smallest unit of classroom work that involves students in comprehending, manipulating, producing, interacting in the
target language.
2. A task has a purpose, aspect to be assessed, process and product, prerequisites, dynamic (individual, pair), resources, place,
time and reflections; it is less controlled than an activity.
ACTIVITY:
1. An activity is the part of a lesson or a purposeful classroom procedure that is controlled by the teacher and involves learners
doing something that relates to the goals of the course
2. An activity can have different phases/parts: Information and motivation (knowing students’ knowledge, experience and interest),
Input/control (students are involved in deepening their understanding-details), Focus/working (linguistic and thematic difficulties
can be isolated and examined in depth), Transfer/application (new knowledge and students’ communicative skills are activated)
EXERCISES/ITEM:
1. An exercise is a teaching procedure that involves controlled, guided or open ended practice of some aspect of language (a drill,
a cloze activity, a reading comprehension passage, multiple choice exercise).

CONCLUSION: For teaching and assessment purposes, all terms apply, but in our ITM context, we will use the term task for all the class
and evaluative procedures teacher apply.
Taken and adapted from: Assessment of Advanced Language Proficiency: Why Performance-based Tasks?. Shohamy and Inbar, 2006;
Teaching English as a Second Language, 3rd edition, Unit 1. Teaching Methodology, Celce Murcia, 2001;
Retrieved from: http://www.professorjackrichards.com/difference-task-exercise-activity/, 2017
Adapted by Carolina Herrera Carvajal, Support Teacher Language Center ITM, 2017