Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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Box 13.6 The flow in task-based learning (Willis, 1996)
The pre-task: the teacher sets up the task.
1 The task cycle
A. task. The students carry out the task in pairs with the teacher monitoring.
B. planning. The students decide how to report back to the whole group.
C. report. The students make their reports.
2 Language focus
A. analysis. Students discuss how others carried out the task on a recording.
B. practice. The teacher practises new language that has cropped up.
This may, however, be a good teaching sequence in any style. In an academic
style, for example, the teacher might present an advertisement for translation
(pre-task) and set the students the specific task of translating parts of it in pairs
(task). They decide how to present it to the group (planning), then compare notes
on it with other groups (report), possibly by using networked word-processing.
Then the students compare their advertisement with real advertisements (analysis)
and they practise new language that has come up (practice). Task-based learning
develops communicative language teaching by providing a much greater range of
classroom activities and much firmer overall guidance for the teacher.
Issues with TBL
The goals for task-based learning that are usually mentioned are fluency, accuracy
and complexity (Skehan, 1998). But people need to be fluent, accurate or complex
because they need a second language for buying and selling, for translating
poetry, for passing an exam, for listening to operas, for travelling, for praying, for
writing a novel, for organising a revolution, or any of the myriad reasons for which
people learn second languages. Task-based learning concentrates on what can work
in the classroom. Its expressed goal is short-term fluency. It does not appear con-
cerned with overall teaching goals, which are hardly ever mentioned. Presumably
there are higher goals to language teaching than fluency, accuracy and complex-
ity, such as the beneficial effects on the students of the second language (personal
goals), the usefulness of knowing a second language for the society (local goals),
and the benefits for the world in general (international goals), as in Chapter 11.
Though classroom tasks may well lead to all these outcomes, this is unlikely to
work if they are not explicitly included in the design and implementation.
Nor does TBL require that tasks should mirror what the students have to do in
the world outside the classroom. Sometimes it is briefly mentioned that it would
be nice if classroom tasks had some relationship to later L2 uses – ‘I regard this as
desirable but difficult to obtain in practice’ (Skehan, 1998: 96). External relevance

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is an optional extra for task-based learning rather than a vital ingredient, as it
would be for most other language teaching. Nor have internal goals been men-
tioned, for example the beneficial educational effects of learning through tasks
on, say, the students’ interactional abilities or their cognitive processes.
The information that is conveyed in tasks and the outcomes of the tasks seem
essentially trivial; there is no reason why they should matter to anybody. Take the
list of specimen tasks given in Ellis (2003):
●
completing one another’s family tree;
●
agreeing on advice to give to the writer of a letter to an agony aunt;
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discovering whether one’s paths will cross in the next week;
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solving a riddle;
●
leaving a message on someone’s answer machine.
These tasks would be fascinating to 10-year-olds, reminding us that information
gap activities indeed originated in primary schools. The old-fashioned justifica-
tion for these topics was the language that they covered, a defence no longer avail-
able for TBL since it does not teach specific language points.
The question of the relevance and power of the native speaker model, so eagerly
debated by much contemporary SLA research, as seen in Chapter 11, has passed
TBL by. It does not seem to care what the long-term purpose may be, provided it
gets short-term gains on performance on tasks. It does not see the classroom as an
L2 user situation, but follows the traditional line of minimizing the use of the first
language. The students are seen as belonging to the learner group described in
Chapter 10, rather than as potential or actual members of L2 user groups. For
example, Willis and Willis (2007) devote a handful of pages to saying how the
teacher can help the students to get over the ‘hurdle’ of using the language, that
is, the first language is seen as a hindrance rather than a help. The reasons for
using the second language for any of these classroom-centred tasks seem entirely
arbitrary: what is the motive for making a shopping list, discussing suicide or com-
pleting your family tree in a second language? The students could carry out the
tasks far better in the first language: why use the second? In other words, despite
its protestations, TBL is essentially language practice, since it provides no motive
for the task to be in another language.
The sword that hangs over both the communicative and TBL styles is the ques-
tion of where the language that the students need for the task comes from in the
first place. As exploitation techniques, tasks require the students to draw on their
own language resources to carry them out, but they do not provide the resources
to do so. The task of completing a family tree requires at least the vocabulary of
relatives – ‘mother’, ‘husband’, ‘aunt’, ‘cousin’, and so on. Many coursebooks use a
tree to teach or revise the words for relatives. Touchstone (McCarthy et al., 2005: 26)
shows an illustrated tree going from grandparents down to children; students
practise by stating the various relationships of the people to each other; later they
fill out two trees in their ‘vocabulary notebook’ – all straightforward standard
teaching. Indeed, family tree exercises can also be found in Move, New Headway
and New Cutting Edge – all, of course, showing a British middle-class view of the
nuclear family, rather than the extended family networks of other classes or cultures.
But how can the students make a family tree if they have not first had the vocab-
ulary taught to them (‘father’, ‘aunt’, ‘cousin’…)? In first language acquisition
The task-based learning style 261

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research, this is called ‘bootstrapping’ – how the child works out the language by
pulling itself up with its own boots. TBL must presuppose bootstrapping of the
language necessary to the task – the students must have learnt the vocabulary and
structures before they can actually perform the task. If this has already been
taught, for example in Jane Willis’s ‘pre-task’ stage, this represents the true teach-
ing stage, not the task itself.
So TBL is not concerned with the overall goals or purposes of language teaching,
only with short-term fluency gains. Hence it does not have a syllabus for teaching
so much as a list of tasks carefully designed and selected to work with the students
at a particular stage. It does not cover many areas of language proficiency such as
pronunciation. The teacher’s role is even more as an organizer and helper than as
an expert, since they do not need particular knowledge of anything but task
design and the minimal grammar necessary for FonF. The students must be pre-
pared for this type of communal learning through tasks, and be convinced that it
is a proper way of acquiring the language and that the teacher knows what they
are doing. This approach will not go down well with highly academic students or
in certain cultural situations. Students have been concerned when they first
encounter this form of teaching where the language content is invisible and not
supplied by the teacher, since it is even further from their expectations than the
communicative style.
The overall difficulty with the TBL style, then, is its detachment from every-
thing else in language use and language teaching: it is a single-solution approach
that tackles the whole of language teaching in the same way. Its tasks are highly
useful exploitation activities, and important for teachers to know about and to use
with other techniques. But they cannot realistically form the core of any language
teaching classroom that sees its students as people engaged with the world.
Second language learning and language teaching styles