Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

part of the grammar-translation methodology for teaching French – and is still
apparently encountered by British university students on their year abroad. In
this, the teacher goes through a written text to draw out and discuss useful vocab-
ulary and grammar on an ad hoc basis. The difference is that in FonF there is a task
to be carried out – and the explication takes place in the second language after the
event rather than as it happens. But the underlying question remains, not whether
grammar should be explained, but what grammar should be explained, out of the
alternatives presented in Chapter 2, for example.
The nature of tasks
The original impetus for task-based learning came from the celebrated Bangalore
Project (Prabhu, 1987), which reacted against both the traditional form of EFL used
in India and the type of situational teaching then practised. The main grounds
were the refusal to recognize the classroom as a ‘real’ situation in its own right,
rather than as a ‘pretend’ L2 situation. A real classroom uses activities that are
proper for classrooms, that is, educational tasks. If learning is doing tasks, teaching
means specifying and helping with the tasks, for example, ‘making the plan of a
house’. The tasks are not defined linguistically, but in an order based on difficulty.
The whole-class activity consisted of a pedagogic dialogue in which the teacher’s
questions were, as in other classrooms, invitations to learners to demonstrate their
ability, not pretended requests for enlightenment; and learners’ responses arose
from their role as learners, not from assumed roles in simulated situations or from
their individual lives outside the classroom (Prabhu, 1987: 28).
Educational value depends on the validity of the tasks and their usefulness as
vehicles for language learning. Hence teaching started to recognize the impor-
tance of the classroom itself as a communicative educational setting in its own
right and to organize the activities that occurred there in terms of educational
tasks rather than tasks that necessarily relate to the world outside the classroom.
Prabhu’s original list of tasks categorized them as:
●
information gap activities, such as the picture comparison described above;
●
reasoning gap activities, deriving new information by inference, such as working
out timetables for the class;
●
opinion gap activities, in which there is no right or wrong answer, only the per-
son’s preference, as in ‘the discussion of a social issue’.
Jane Willis (1996), on the other hand, lists six main types of task: listing, ordering
and sorting, comparing, problem solving, sharing personal experience and creative. In
Atlas 1 (Nunan, 1995, teacher’s book) there are ten types of task, including predict-
ing (e.g. ‘predicting what is to come on the learning process’), conversational patterns
(‘using expressions to start conversations and keep them going’) and cooperating
The task-based learning style 259

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(‘sharing ideas and learning with other students’). The concept of the task, then,
does vary considerably: it seems to be a peg that you can hang many coats on.
Jane Willis (1996) has provided a useful outline of the flow in task-based learn-
ing (shown in Box 13.6), which has three main components – pre-task, task-cycle
and language focus.
Second language learning and language teaching styles