Chapter 14 Taskbased Language Education
Chapter 14 Taskbased Language Education
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter the main principles behind “task-based language teaching” (TBLT) will be
highlighted. First, the main reasons why task-based language teaching is believed to foster
language learning will be discussed. The chapter then moves on to a description of the
main features of tasks and of the kind of interaction that task-based language teaching is
supposed to give rise to. This part of the chapter will include a description of the role of
the teacher in task-based language teaching. The chapter will end with a discussion of the
implications of TBLT for the assessment of language skills.
BACKGROUND
TASK-BASED LANGUAGE EDUCATION: MAIN PRINCIPLES
Most scholars, curriculum developers, and language teachers will agree that the basic aim
of second/foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the target language for
functional purposes. Most students, especially adult students, will only make the effort to
follow a language course (and pay for it), study hard, and take exams because they feel
the new language can be of use for them: learning the language will, for instance, allow
them to find a new job or meet new friends, travel around, communicate with the municipal
services of the town they have moved to, help their children with their schoolwork, or
simply enjoy themselves. Already in the late 1970s, this view was duly acknowledged in
the seminal writings underpinning Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), emphasizing
the importance of teaching language for communicative purposes. Today, the urge to take
communicative purpose as a starting point for the design of curricula and programs for
language teaching underlies approaches such as outcome-based teaching (see Leung this
volume, chap. 17) and competency-based education.
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Performing such communicative tasks in real life calls for a complex interplay of
phonological, morphogrammatical, semantic, sociopragmatic, and other aspects of lan-
guage use. As the example shows, different skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening)
will often be integrated in the same activity. Furthermore, in real life this interplay is
intentionally driven, in the sense that people use language in order to reach (predominantly
nonlinguistic) goals. Chopping up the language and presenting / practicing these different
linguistic aspects in isolation may well lead to the development of isolated skills, but will
put a heavy load on the students’ shoulders (and cognitive abilities) in terms of integrating
all these isolated skills into goal-oriented language behavior.
KEY ISSUES
TASKS: MAIN FEATURES
From the above, a number of key features of the tasks that constitute a task-based syllabus
can be deduced.
cycle (before, during, and after task performance). Typically, highly relevant formal fea-
tures will be dealt with when a student asks for this or when many students performing the
same task run into the same formal problems. In the latter case, certain formal features may
prove to be task-essential. Paying attention to formal linguistic features at these moments
may increase the chance that students find the explicit form-focus relevant to their personal
needs, and will be able to apply the new explicit knowledge to actual language use almost
immediately.
With regard to the third core action that teachers are expected to take, a number of
interactional moves have been suggested to be particularly fruitful in terms of promoting
language learning. For instance, through recasting, the teacher can offer the students richer
versions of what they were trying to say, but are not yet able to put into (adequate or
accurate) words. Likewise, through the negotiation of meaning, teachers can help their
students to unravel the meaning of new words and expressions. By asking clarification
and confirmation questions, or giving feedback, the teacher can “push” the students into
producing more complex output. Finally, by joining the conversation and checking students’
comprehension, the teacher will be able to offer input of the kind that is suited to the students’
needs, and raise the chance that the input will turn into intake. Many of these interactional
moves are also expected to occur in group work – so among students – especially when
task formats, such as opinion-gap and information-gap tasks, challenge the learner to
convey information that the other students do not have. In sociocultural views on language
learning (e.g., Lantolf 2006), the co-construction of new knowledge and skills that occurs
in interaction between teachers and learners, and among learners, actually constitutes the
core of learning activity. In this perspective, interaction is learning, rather than one of a
long list of useful devices that foster the restructuring of cognitive systems that scientists
usually refer to as learning.
For many teachers, task-based language teaching represents a major shift away from
their traditional classroom practice. For instance, teachers who have been working with a
PPP (present, practice, produce) syllabus for a long time may find it hard to systematically
adopt functional tasks as the basic unit of educational activity in their classrooms. Similarly,
the assertiveness and intensive processes of peer interaction that tasks are expected to give
rise to may clash with firmly established, more hierarchical teacher-student relations in cer-
tain cultures. So, even though TBLT is propagated as a very promising language teaching
pedagogy in governmentally issued educational policy documents around the world, the
actual implementation of task-based language teaching in authentic classrooms shows far
more erratic patterns and wide variation between teachers, countries, continents, and educa-
tional systems. Along the way, different shades of “task-basedness” have emerged. Skehan
(1998) distinguishes “strong” and “weak” forms of TBLT, while Ellis (2003), in a simi-
lar vein, subsumes different types of TBLT under headings like “task-supported language
teaching” versus “task-referenced language teaching.” As can be expected, these terms are
intended to cover virtually all the points on the continuum between a strongly teacher-
dominated, discrete-point, form-focused approach in which tasks are merely inserted to
allow students an incidental chance to practice specific forms for semiauthentic purposes
on the one hand, to full-blown, learner-centered, holistic, functional approaches in which
the performance of authentic tasks forms the core business of educational activity, and a
focus of form is only inserted when necessary to construct more adequate meaning. In
the latter case, there is a strong tendency to leave the traditional physical setting of the
classroom and integrate language learning with communication in real-life situations (for
instance, stimulating language development as the students are trying to communicate with
their real-life partner on the work floor or over the Internet).
TASK-BASED ASSESSMENT
In TBLT, tasks are used not only as a basic unit for the description of goals and for the orga-
nization of educational activity in the classroom, but also for the assessment of students’
language skills and the progress they are making. For this purpose, learners will be periodi-
cally asked to perform tasks that replicate authentic language use and strongly resemble the
kinds of tasks that students are expected to perform outside the classroom; in other words,
task-based syllabi of the strong form are characterized by a strong coherence with regard
to the selection of target tasks (goals), classroom tasks (education), and assessment tasks
(evaluation).
The students’ performances of these tasks will preferably be rated according to the
criteria that reflect the norms of task accomplishment in the target discourse communities
(Norris, Bygate, and Van den Branden, 2009; Norris et al. 1998). The rating thus primarily
focuses on the extent to which the student can perform tasks to criterion as established by
insiders or experts in the field, rather than on the students’ ability to complete discrete-point
grammar items. For productive tests, assessment grids accompany the assessment tasks,
carefully describing what items are required to meet the preset quality standards, and what
formal demands need to be met.
Assessment directly feeds back into educational activity. Assessment not only informs
the students about the progress they have made or the current interlanguage level they
have acquired but also provides teachers and headteachers with rich information about the
effectiveness of the educational support they have offered to individual learners, and the
gaps in the students’ current interlanguage system that require more intensive treatment.
To enhance the integration of assessment, teaching and learning, recent developments with
regard to task-based assessment include the introduction of portfolios (in which, among
other things, the students collect samples of tasks they have performed), peer interaction
(inviting students to rate and evaluate each others task performances) and dynamic assess-
ment (in which, for instance, teachers assess the extent to which they need to interactionally
support classroom performance of semiauthentic tasks by individual students).
CONCLUSION
Task-based language education fully acknowledges the basic insight that language learning
is a highly complex endeavor. Developing language skills, involving the integrated use
of various subskills, requires ample opportunities for students to learn in real operating
conditions. In task-based language education, therefore, relatively straight lines are drawn
between the authentic tasks that learners need to be able to perform outside the classroom
(target tasks), the tasks that constitute the backbone of educational activity (classroom
activities), and the tasks that are used to ascertain the progress the learners are making
(assessment tasks). This does not, however, imply that task-based language education is a
straightforward enterprise for teachers: since learners are bound to differ in terms of the
speed with which they make progress, the task motivation they show, the level of language
proficiency they have already acquired, and many other features, they are bound to react
to the input and output demands of classroom tasks in many different ways. In order to
create order in this human chaos, the main essence of the task provides a crucial guiding
line for teachers: if 25 students are trying to write a report about an observation they have
made, the main questions remain (irrespective of which student the teacher is supporting):
What elements should a good report contain? Which message has the student produced
until now? What kind of support could take this student a bit further on the road toward the
accomplishment of a better report than the one he or she has produced so far? Ultimately,
the main essence of language use remains the same: making social meaning for a purpose,
and using linguistic forms to do so in an adequate way.
Key readings
Bygate, M., P. Skehan, & M. Swain. (Eds.). (2001). Researching pedagogic tasks: Second
language learning and testing. Harlow: Longman.
Crookes, G., & S. Gass. (Eds.). (1993). Tasks and language learning: Integrating theory
and practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Norris, J. (2009). Task-based teaching and testing. In M. Long & C. Doughty (Eds.), The
handbook of language teaching (pp. 578–594). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Samuda, V., & M. Bygate. (2008). Tasks in second language learning. London: Palgrave.
Van den Branden, K. (Ed.). (2006). Task-based language teaching: From theory to practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van den Branden, K., M. Bygate, & J. Norris. (2009). Task-based language teaching: A
reader. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Van den Branden, K., K. Van Gorp, & M. Verhelst. (Eds.). (2007). Tasks in action: Task-
based language education from a classroom-based perspective. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Scholars Publishing.
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