Defining Tasks

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), also called Task-Based Instruction (TBI), is a method under Communicative Approach. Task usually refers to a specialized form of technique or series of techniques closely allied with communicative curricula, and as such must minimally have communicative goals. The common thread running through half a dozen definitions of task is its focus on the authentic use of language for meaningful communicative purposes beyond the language classroom (Brown, 2001: 129). Willis views that Task-Based Language Teaching refers to an approach based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching. Some of its proponents (e.g. Willis 1996) present it as a logical development of Communicative Language Teaching since it draws on several principles that formed part of the Communicative Language Teaching Movement from the 1980s. For example:

•　Activities that involve real communication are essential for language learning;

•　Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning;

•　Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.

Task-Based Instruction is a perspective within a CLT framework that forces the teachers to carefully consider all the techniques that you use in the classroom in terms of a number of important pedagogical purposes:

•　Real-world contexts;

•　Contribute to communicative goals;

•　Specified objectives;

•　Engage learners in problem-solving activity.

In some books, the word “task” has been used as a label for various activities including grammar exercises, practice activities and role plays. As I shall show in this section, these are not tasks in the sense the word is used here.

Willis, in his work A Framework for Task-Based Learning, defined that tasks are always activities where the target language is used by the learner for a communicative purpose (goal) in order to achieve an outcome.

The key assumptions of Task-Based Instruction are summarized by Feez (1998: 17) as:

•　The focus is on process rather than product;

•　Basic elements are purposeful activities and tasks that emphasize communication and meaning;

•　Learners learn language by interacting communicatively and purposefully while engaged in the activities and tasks.

Activities and tasks can be either:

•　Those that learners might need to achieve in real life;

•　Those that have a pedagogical purpose specific to the classroom.

Activities and tasks of a task-based syllabus are sequenced according to difficulty.

The difficulty of a task depends on a range of factors including the previous experience of the learner, the complexity of the task, the language required to undertake the task, and the degree of support available.

TBLT makes an important distinction between target tasks, which students must accomplish beyond the classroom, and pedagogical tasks, which form the nucleus of the classroom activity. Target tasks are not unlike the functions of language that are listed in Notional-Functional Syllabuses. However, they are much more specific and more explicitly related to classroom instruction. If, for example, “giving personal information” is a communicative function for language, then an appropriately stated target task might be “giving personal information in a job interview”. Notice that the task specifies a context. Pedagogical tasks include any of a series of techniques designed ultimately to teach students to perform the target task; the climacticpedagogical task actually involves students in some forms of simulation of the target task itself (say, through a role-play simulation in which certain roles are assigned to pairs of learners).

Pedagogical tasks are distinguished by their specific goals that point beyond the language classroom to the target task. They may, however, include both formal and functional techniques. A pedagogical task designed to teach students to give personal information in a job interview might, for example, involve:

•　Exercises in comprehension of wh- questions with do- insertion (“When do you work at Macy’s?”);

•　Drills in the use of frequency adverbs (“I usually work until five o’clock.”);

•　Listening to extracts of job interviews;

•　Analyzing the grammar and discourse of the interviews;

•　Modeling an interview: teacher and one student;

•　Role-playing a simulated interview: students in pairs.

While you might be tempted to consider only the climactic task as the one fulfilling the criterion of pointing beyond the classroom to the real world, all of the techniques build toward enabling the students to perform the final technique.

A task-based curriculum, then, specifies what a learner needs to do with the English language in terms of target tasks and organizes a series of pedagogical tasks intended to reach those goals. Be careful that you do not look at task-based teaching as a hodge-podge of useful little things that the learner should be able to do, all thrown together haphazardly into the classroom. In fact, a distinguishing feature of task-based curricula is their insistence on pedagogical soundness in the development and sequencing of tasks. The teacher and curriculum planner are called upon to consider carefully the following dimensions of communicative tasks:

•　Goal;

•　Input from the teacher;

•　Techniques;

•　The role of the teacher;

•　The role of the learner;

•　Evaluation.

In TBI, the priority is not the bits and pieces of language, but rather the functional purposes for which language must be used. While Content-Based Instruction focuses on subject-matter content, Task-Based Instruction focuses on a whole set of real-world tasks themselves. Input for tasks can come from a variety of authentic sources:

And the list goes on and on. The pedagogical task specifies exactly what learners will do with the input and what the respective roles of the teacher and learners are. The evaluation thereof forms an essential component that determines its success and offers feedback for performing the task again with another group of learners at another time.

Task-based curricula differ from Content-Based, Theme-Based, and Experiential Instruction in that the course objectives are somewhat more language-based. While there is an ultimate focus on communication and purpose and meaning, the goals are linguistic in nature. They are not linguistic in the traditional sense of just focusing on grammar or phonology; but by maintaining the centrality of functions like greeting people, expressing opinions, requesting information, etc., the course goals center on learners’ pragmatic language competence.

So we have in task-based teaching a well-integrated approach to language teaching that asks you to organize your classroom around those practical tasks that language users engage in “out there” in the real world. These tasks virtually always imply several skill areas, not just one, and so by pointing toward tasks, we disengage ourselves from thinking only in terms of the separate four skills. Instead, principles oflistening, speaking, reading, and writing become appropriately subsumed under the rubric of what it is our learners are going to do with this language.

There are a number of different interpretations in the literature on what, exactly, a task is. What these various understandings all emphasize, however, is the centrality of the task itself in a language course and, for task-based teaching as an overall approach, the importance of organizing a course around communicative tasks that learners need to engage in outside the classroom. Peter Skehan’s (1998a: 95) capsulization of a task as an activity in which:

•　Meaning is primary;

•　There is some communication problem to solve;

•　There is some sort of relationship to comparable real-world activities;

•　Task completion has some priority;

•　The assessment of the task is in terms of outcome.

(Brown, 2001)

Summary of interpretation on Task-Based Instruction

Task-Based Instruction (TBI) means the hundred and one things people do in a real life. It has a particular objective, appropriate content, a specified working procedures/process; based on a range of outcomes the learners undertake the task. It focuses on meaning rather than form in a real context through comprehending, manipulating, producing, interacting, the process of thoughts in pairs or groups. The product can be observable in the oral way or written form.