Some questions and answers

Why is it so difficult to introduce innovations like TBL?

The management of innovation is important. If a proposed innovation is theoretically convincing it is met with a number of defensive reactions. The first is the one that we have noted already. All kinds of problems and criticisms are identified, despite the fact that those problems and criticisms apply in even greater measure to existing practice. So critics of TBLT point to the fact that research indicates that TBLT cannot guarantee accuracy, quite ignoring that the same criticism can be made of grammar-based approaches. They suggest that some learners might find the learning outcomes unsatisfactory, but they fail to acknowledge that under the existing approach almost everybody finds the learning outcomes unsatisfactory. They shake their heads and wonder if, given the lack of concern with formal accuracy, the proposed innovation will help learners achieve a usable competence. But they seem not to recognise that the existing approach clearly fails to do this. In other words all kinds of criticisms, problems, and obstacles are placed in the way of innovation, but there is a failure to apply the same critical criteria to existing practice. It is important to establish from the outset that the traditional methodology is failing learners. There is a clear need for innovation.

A second line of defence is to claim that the proposed innovation has already been tried and found wanting. People claim that communicative language teaching has been tried but that it was a failure so people have now gone back to teaching grammar. Although communicative language teaching has been widely recommended in the literature it has rarely been fully applied. A look at course-books and teaching materials worldwide will confirm this. It is difficult to find commercial materials that are communicative on anything but a very weak definition of that term. Overwhelmingly materials are grammar-based, and begin each teaching cycle with the presentation of some kind of language point. This is often the case even when the materials lay claim to some kind of task-based methodology.

How does TBLT relate to communicative language teaching?

Approaches to language teaching can be seen on a continuum from form-based to meaning-based. Form-based approaches rest on the assumption that language should be introduced or presented to learners item by item as a formal system. Once they have understood how a particular linguistic form is structured and used they can begin to use it for communication. Meaning-based approaches make the assumption that learners develop a language system through their attempts to use that language. The role of the teacher is to provide opportunities for meaningful activities, to organise exposure to language which will provide appropriate input for the learner’s system, enabling natural acquisition, and to encourage learners to look critically at that input and learn from it, for example by finding a new way of expressing a particular meaning.

Main authors

Dave Willis worked for twenty years as a British Council English Language Officer, then as a teacher and teacher trainer, most recently at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely in the ELT field, authoring numerous books and twice winning the Duke of Edinburgh Prize. His latest books are Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and lexis in English language teaching (CUP, 2003) and Doing Task-based Teaching (OUP, 2007), co-authored with his spouse, Jane Willis.

Jane Willis is a veteran teacher and prizewinning author. She taught most recently in the TEFL/TESOL graduate programme at Aston University. She has authored and co-authored many books, including the Collins Cobuild series (with her spouse, Dave Willis), and co-edited Task-based Instruction in Foreign Language Education with Betty Lou Leaver (Georgetown University Press, 2004) and Teachers Exploring Tasks with Corony Edwards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Her latest book, for young learners, isEnglish Through Music with Anice Paterson (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Myth or challenge ? 
Sometimes task based language is considered a fashion or a myth but task based language is an indispensable strategy to get a meaningful and appropiate learning.

If you are a confident class teacher with a range of teaching techniques, you can use those techniques to work successfully with task-based lessons. If you are a teacher in training these are the skills you are acquiring.

Those kind of activities motivate children to interrogate themselves and don’t be content with the first answer they found.

The TBL encourage an effective communication using different resources and codes, the management of information sources, the participation in autonomous groups of work and the execution of a previous plan by the children.

In addition to this, the task based language stimulates the creativity so the students are more likely to be engaged, which may further motivate them in their language learning. This will allow them to take different ways to build something unique and feel it as if they were the owners. 

"New times require new methods".