Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the applicability of two different kinds of activities, task activities and tasks, as a means for the improvement of the participants' understanding of the present perfect and the past tense at a technical college in Japan. A quasi-experimental study was conducted, setting four intact classes as experimental groups and one as a control group. Two of the experimental groups had initially experienced engaging in task activities three times, and the other two experimental groups had not experienced such activities. In the study, one of the experienced groups and one of the non-experienced groups practiced a task, and the rest practiced a task activity. The groups were compared in terms of their scores on multiple-choice tests, assessing if the learner could supply the most appropriate verb forms in a written dialogue. The quantitative results show that for the improvement of the target structures, the groups which engaged in a task showed significant improvement after the treatment whether or not they had previous experience with task activities. However, when the results of the test for other tenses were analyzed in order to see if there were any effects of overgeneralization, only the experienced groups which then engaged in either a task activity or a task showed an immediate significant difference.
