Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Keywords
In the past few years the most fashionable style among teaching methodologists
has been task-based learning (TBL). In the everyday sense of the word ‘task’, all
language teaching consists of tasks, whether these are translation tasks, structure
drill tasks or information gap tasks: a teacher’s job is to set up things for the stu-
dents to do in the classroom, that is, give them tasks to carry out. But TBL uses
‘task’ in a narrower way, as seen in the definition by Martin Bygate et al. (2001):
‘A task is an activity which requires learners to use language, with emphasis on
meaning, to attain a goal.’ This definition illustrates some of the main points of
TBL that most of its enthusiasts agreed on. Of course, as with any teaching exer-
cise, the task the teacher plans may be very different from what the students actu-
ally do (Hosenfeld, 1976; Seedhouse, 2005b)
According to the definition, a task ‘requires learners to use language’: students
are learning the language by using it, as assumed by the communicative style. This
implies that learning is the same as processing, that is, codebreaking is the same as
decoding, reminiscent of Krashen’s thinking. While the communicative style
organizes its tasks and activities around a language point – teaching a function, a
communicative strategy, and so on – TBL denies this: the language must come
from the learners themselves, not from the teacher. It is solving the requirements
of the task itself that counts. So a task is chosen because it is a good task, not
because it teaches a particular language point. Suppose we design a class task:
‘Make a shopping list for your weekly internet order from a supermarket.’ This task
requires the students to work together and to report back; but it does not tell them
how to interact to achieve this, nor does it supply the vocabulary.
The second part of the definition is that a task has ‘an emphasis on meaning’. The
teaching focus is not on the structures, language functions, vocabulary items, and so
on, of earlier approaches, but on the meaning of what is said. Hence structure drills
count as exercises, not as tasks, since they do not involve meaning. Meaning in TBL
is one person conveying information appropriate to the particular task to another
person, rather like information communicative teaching. There is no requirement

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for the information to be meaningful in any other way, say by emotionally involv-
ing the student, or for it to be useful in the world outside the classroom: meaning
relates only to the task at hand. However, it is meaning in a pure information sense,
rather like the digits of computer data. As Garcia Mayo (2007: 91) puts it, TBL is ‘a
computational model of acquisition in which tasks are viewed as devices which can
influence learners’ information processing’. So the focus in the shopping list task is
entirely on the content of the list, the information to be transmitted to the super-
market. It is irrelevant whether the students have ever done or will do online shop-
ping orders.
The last part of the definition requires the student ‘to use language … to attain
a goal’. The point of the task is not to master a specific language point, but to
achieve a particular non-language goal. There has to be an outcome to a task
which the students do or do not achieve. Again, this distinguishes tasks from
other forms of teaching activities, where a task ends essentially when the teacher
says so. The goal of the shopping list task is the shopping list itself; have they suc-
ceeded in making a list that will cater for a week’s shopping needs?
TBL draws on an eclectic range of sources for its support. It is related to the
interaction model in Chapter 12 in that it depends on negotiation of meaning; to
the sociocultural model in that it depends on peer-to-peer scaffolding; and to the
Conversation Analysis model in that it depends on continuous conversational
interaction between the students. It is also related to the various views of process-
ing seen in Chapter 7, in particular to views on the centrality of meaning in pro-
cessing. Its main support is classroom-based research studies which show in
general that TBL does lead to an improvement in fluency and accuracy. However,
this is not the same thing as proving that TBL leads to acquisition and to use out-
side the classroom.