Commentary 1
Commentary 2

Commentary 1
A common topic for lower level students is 'family'. Tasks could include:

1. LISTING: Can you list the names of 10 people in your family? (maybe work from family photos brought in by students?). Write the family relationship to you next to each name. If you have a large family, add more names.
2. ORDERING / SORTING: Draw a family tree for your partner's family from the list they give you. Help your partner to fill in any gaps.
3. MATCHING: Who do you look like in your family? Tell your partner which family members you look like. Show them your photographs and see if they agree. (Useful link into 'describing people' topic).
4. PROBLEM SOLVING: Choose a family member from the tree for your partner (but NOT you!). Can your partner work out the relationship to all the other people on the tree in one minute? (Or one of those 'If X is married to Y and Y's mother is called Z', etc, logic brain teasers as a reading text).
5. LISTING / RANKING class survey: which person in the class has the most brothers and sisters / uncles and aunts / cousins ? Who has the least?
6. MEMORY / MATCHING: How well do you know your classmates? Look at the family trees (from earlier in the lesson, or previous lesson as a fun revision task, but with student's names blanked out, maybe on OHP). Who do you think they belong to?
7. SHARING PERSONAL EXPERIENCE (ANECDOTES): Choose one or two people from your family tree who have done something interesting or unusual, or who are especially important to you in some way. Tell your partner about them. Ask your partner about people on his / her family tree.

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Commentary 2
Here is my 'think aloud' account of my choice and order of tasks:

To do all seven of the suggested tasks above would be overkill for a relatively well-defined and straightforward topic like 'family'. I think I would pick i) as a simple and quick introductory task and a way of revising / introducing key vocabulary and building confidence. The transcript below of my trial run of this task suggests that it would be ideal for this. I would like to finish on either iii) or vii) as either of these would also serve as an introduction to the topic 'describing people' which I think I would position next on my syllabus. (Do any of your sequences of tasks end with a 'topic bridging' task like this?) Task vii) seems quite a bit more challenging than iii) as it involves not just physical descriptions but possibly some quite complex story telling - and if my students are only at the stage of learning terms for family relationships I think this will be beyond them. So I'll keep vii) in reserve for later in the course when it'll provide useful revision of 'family' lexis, and use iii) in this sequence.

I think v), the class survey, would be a fairly quick and fun follow on from the initial listing task i), but there is also a natural series that seems to emerge from the family trees which I think would be more fruitful. So after i) (listing of names) I'd do ii) (partners draw each other's trees - not necessarily as easy as it sounds as I anticipate some negotiation as they'll get some details wrong for each other - look at the transcript to see what happened when I tried this), then the problem solving iv). Problem solving is by its nature more cognitively challenging than listing, and although task ii) is also a sort of problem for the person drawing the tree, they will have constant input from the person who knows how it should look, making it easier through this partner support. I wouldn't simply ask students to do their own trees as this would not give them any reason to interact! I am therefore quite happy that the sequence i), ii), iv) gives a progression in terms of cognitive challenge and linguistic challenge (see the transcript of selected extracts from a task recording below).

Note that in the recording of these tasks with fluent / native speakers, tasks ii) and iv) ended up merging, so there was no point in doing task iv) separately for recording purposes. But I think I would still ask students to do both. That way, they could do task iv) after they had listened to the tape and done some language focus work. If tasks i) and ii) (plus related planning, reports and language focus work) could be completed in one lesson, the problem solving task iv) would make a good starting point for the next lesson.

By the time we had done these three tasks (with planning and reports, etc) I think we'd have had enough of family trees, (in fact I might even drop task iv) if the topic was dragging), but just in case it went faster than expected, and if there was time I'd then do the class survey, but this would very much be a standby activity, or an alternative to iv) that would get students on their feet and 'stir them up' a bit. I'd then finish with iii), the 'who do you look like?' task. Although not too challenging from a cognitive perspective, the increased linguistic demands make this the appropriate stage for this matching task (see transcript). Altogether I would anticipate this topic taking two class periods

In selecting my sequence of tasks I hope you can see that I was considering how I could offer a logical progression (eg production of the family trees had to precede their use in activity iv), and also provide a gradual, progressive increase in terms of cognitive and / or linguistic challenge. eg task ii) would be much harder if i) had not already been completed, and I think iv) would be much harder if done 'cold' with a family tree provided by the teacher rather than one already worked on.

Note: the concept of 'family' varies greatly from culture to culture. Here in Britain it generally means close blood relations and in-laws. In some parts of the world, terms like 'uncle', 'aunt', 'cousin', 'sister' are used much more loosely to indicate community members or simply trusted or respected visitors (for example, in Malaysia, the children of ex-students that I visited were expected to refer to me as 'Auntie'). A discussion of the meaning and use of different terms for family members in the students' mother tongue culture and the target culture would be a good way of introducing the topic and task series.

Transcripts of extracts from 'family relations' task

Task i): Partner A lists names of family members and say who they are. (We did this as a pair, with A writing names and relationships while B (me!) watched - the 'writing' partner spontaneously began to talk through what he was doing as I watched / listened - something I hadn't predicted! Another interesting feature was that because the speaker is writing at the same time, he speaks very slowly with long pauses between utterances as he takes time to write. Ideal easy listening for building the confidence of beginners!

1. Fatima is my mother. Ahmad is my father. And then I'll come to brothers and sisters. Kamal - brother. Awatif - sister. Hayat - sister. ... Zeinab - aunt, my mother's cousin. Mohamed, a maternal uncle. Ismail, another maternal uncle. So, yes, one more maybe ... yes, all right ... a niece, or a nephew ... Mohamed. As a matter of fact, named after me!

Task ii) / iv): Partner B uses A's list to draw family tree. A and B give relationships between different family members. My surprise here was that in the process of drawing the tree, we spent quite a bit of time referring to relationships between members of the family other than my partner. So we seemed to be conflating tasks ii) and iv). On the basis of this, I did not then feel it necessary to make a separate recording of task iv).

This is a good point to break the recording. I would use the tape up to here for post-task ii) listening and language focus, and the rest before and after task iv)

Task iii): Family resemblances