A teacher asked her learners to watch a movie two days ago and now she asks…

Concept: In language pedagogy, assessment/comprehension tasks are graded by how far the learner must move beyond the text. An extrapolative task is one that requires the learner to go beyond the information actually given and project it onto a new, hypothetical or personal situation — predicting, imagining or applying ideas the text never states outright (e.g. “what would you do in the character's place?”).

Application: Here the learners first watch a movie, then are asked to discuss “what would they do if they were the hero/heroine?” They are not retrieving facts from the movie; they are stepping outside it to imagine their own response in the character's situation. Inferring/extending beyond the given content into a personal hypothetical is exactly the defining feature of an extrapolative task, so the task is named for that operation.

Contrast: The near-miss choices fail on what they actually denote:

• Critical pedagogy — a whole teaching philosophy about questioning power and social structures in the classroom, not a name for a single comprehension/assessment task.

• Speaking task — names only the skill exercised (oral production); a discussion can be speaking without going beyond the text, so it does not capture the beyond-the-text projection that defines this task.

• Thinking task — a vague, non-technical label; every task involves thinking, so it does not pick out the specific operation of extending beyond the given content.

Going beyond the given content into a personal hypothetical “what would you do” is the hallmark of an extrapolative task.