Expertise in Pedagogic Task Design

The focus of this chapter is expertise in the design of second language pedagogic tasks. Tasks themselves have been an important influence in second language teaching and research for over two decades, but task design remains relatively under-explored as an area for empirical inquiry. In this chapter, I explore the kinds of empirical insights that might be derived from studying task design from an expertise perspective, the kinds of pedagogic problems such insights could address, and the role such insights could play in training novice designers and preparing teachers to work with tasks. The chapter is divided into three sections. Section 1 situates tasks and task design in their pedagogic and research contexts and explores the ‘task’ of task design with a view to teasing out what task design entails, and what this implies for researching task design expertise. Section 2 illustrates how issues raised in Section 1 have been researched to date by focusing on two recent studies of second language pedagogic task design expertise.

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