Lifeline Cards (An attempt at adapting Task Based Learning)

I read alot on Jimbo's Teaching in Japan blog about the difficulty of adapting Task Based Learning to Japanese Junior High School and High-School environements.

Last week I attempted a TBL activity where I got the students to decide on a 'dream schedule" as a group and then fill out page two of this document. As I mentioned many of the students didn' really take it seriously and spoke in Japanese anyway.

A JTE at my school and I talked about the problem. She suggested an idea which I will try tomorrow. Give the students a Lifeline! In the TV gameshow Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the people can use a lifeline to 1)call a friend or 2) ask the audience 3) Have two wrong answers removed from the choice.

The JTE suggested that we give each group life line cards which allow them to say one sentence or word in Japanese during the task.

The other card would have a question mark, this lifeline would entitle them to ask me or the JTE a question in Japanese. For example how do I say 'yubinkyoku' in English.? They can use five of these cards.
The existence of the cards would reinforce the idea in their heads that they must speak English as much as possible , but still give them a chance to use Japanese if they get stuck.

Here is a picture of the cards I made today.

I thought this might be a good way to avoid the problems I had last week. So today I made a set of cards.
Three Japanese Speaking Permit cards and five Question Mark cards. I wonder if it will have an effect.

This could be used with any TBL task to give the students a time-out.  I hope that as the year goes by we can give less and less 'Lifelines' as the students will be better at doing the tasks without needing them.