Options in a task-based language-teaching curriculum

Abstract

I draw on the education literature to describe four educational curriculum models, which serve as a basis for presenting four TBLT curricula based on the proposals of Prabhu (1987); Willis (1996), Long (1985, 2015a, 2015b) and myself (Ellis, 2003 and 2019) – all of which have figured in the development of TBLT. I propose a set of questions that can be used to evaluate these models. I then turn to examine the curriculum design process, identifying options in TBLT curricula that are available at each stage of the process. I point to a tension that exists between what SLA theory indicates is needed and what environmental constraints make feasible and conclude with a plea for flexibility by weighing up which options are appropriate in different teaching situations. I also summarize how I see TBLT benefitting from adopting a broad education perspective that includes critical language pedagogy.

Four decades of ELT development in Hong Kong: Impact of global theories on the changing curricula and textbooks

“…The ‘communicative purposes’ mentioned in these curricula are broadly aligned with Ellis’s (2003, p. 339) concept of ‘situational’ and ‘interactional’ authenticity; the former concerns whether a task corresponds to ‘a situation found in the real world’ and the latter establishes ‘patterns of interaction similar to those found in the real world’. However, all of the communicative and task-based curricula place equal emphasis on the learners’ mastery of the forms and their meaningful use, as in the 1983 curriculum.…”

“…159–161) with an emphasis on the ability to communicate. Probably because the distinction between tasks and exercises was a central point of discussion in the literature when TBLT was first introduced (see Ellis, 2003), the term ‘task’ is specifically defined in this curriculum as having a ‘purpose’ and providing a ‘context from which the purpose for using language emerges’, involving ‘learners in a mode of thinking and doing’, leading ‘towards a product’ and requiring learners ‘to draw upon their framework of knowledge skills’ (CDC, 1999, p. 43). Subsequently in the 2002/07 ELT curriculum the task-based learning and teaching approach, rather than the communicative approach in general, became the main focus of the discussion.…”

“…tasks involving general samples of language; e.g. Skehan, 1998), Ellis (2003, 2017) suggests that explicit instruction involving focused tasks (i.e. those designed to elicit the processing of specific, pre-determined linguistic features) is effective and necessary (see also Ellis, 2016).…”

“…These cultural values may conflict with the Western premises of CLT instruction. Thus the aforementioned constraints may mean that in practice CLT or TBLT are often adapted in various ways (Carless, 2007, 2015), with learning and teaching activities somewhere between what Ellis called an ‘exercise’ and a ‘task’ (Ellis, 2003, 2017).…”

Investigating Iranian English Learners’ Private Speech Across Proficiency Levels and Gender Based on Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

“…The mediation exists in higher mental activities and what mediates the mind is the social activity. To put it differently, this theory asserts that social activities organize endowed capabilities like language and enable individuals to consciously control mental activities such as planning and problem solving (Donato, 2000 ; Ellis, 2003 ; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006 ; Ohta, 2001 ). Thus , the main function of private speech is its mediating function as a tool in the process of learning, teachers need not be worried about the language learners’ incomplete or incomprehensible utterances as they are striving to internalize their present thinking, as a result, errors are not seen in terms of any deviations from native- speaker norm, but different cognitive functions (Anani Sarab & Gordani, 2014 ).…”