DATA ANALYSIS CONCLUSIONS

Conclusions

- The tasks chain offers opportunities for contact with the target language beyond school as informal practice.
- The tasks chain, when implemented as a habit at home, has a positive learning effect, which can be applied as a self-access reinforcement continuum.
- The online tasks give a model of correct pronunciation that as effect help parents who do not manage the language in order to support students at home, enhancing as well phonological awareness, which is the basis for teaching the vocabulary.
- Parental support is a necessary effect, that also has a positive result on students’ vocabulary ability.
- The amount of activities that required parents’ participation was significant, which favored their degree of involvement throughout the method’s implementation providing affectiveness to back up the process.
- Tasks Chain design must respond to students learning styles and affectivity.
- The Tasks Chain designed enhanced students’ vocabulary ability, assuring input, storage, and retrieval. (McCarthy, 1990).
- The tasks chain designed had effects regarding behaviors, such as discipline, study habits, and interest towards language learning and computer based learning.
- The method offers a prospect for students’ autonomy development.
- The method has strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to be worked out for future implementation.
- It is indispensable to take students to the Computer Lab(s) and train them in the use of the online tasks.
- Questionnaires and other type of written information to be given to parents must be written in both English and Spanish to assure comprehension.
- Through carrying out this research project, we reflected upon our teaching practices, before, during and after its implementation, which helped us enhance our professional disposition towards vocabulary teaching based on making informed decisions. (Mills, 2000).


Unexpected conclusions

- This research also helped scaffold students’ self-regulated learning, metacognition and autonomy during their practice with the online tasks.
- The online tasks go beyond the target population’s use because of its easy access through the school’s web page which makes it available for anyone who wants to explore them (e.g. for tutoring, reinforcement or leveling students, for parents to use with their other children).
- There is a new teacher who has been using the task chain, and she found it inspirational to add some new refreshing tasks to the chain: such as a popular children game called “teléfono roto” - “broken telephone game”, in which students in a line tell a word to each other as a secret; depending on the students’ attention and aural discrimination, the message gets to the last student in the right way or wrong way, allowing students to recognize the vocabulary properly or to correct it when necessary.