Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

Mike Long

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780470658949, 9780470658932
• eBook ISBN: 9781118882214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers an in-depth explanation of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the methods necessary to implement it in the language classroom successfully.

• Combines a survey of theory and research in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) with insights from language teaching and the philosophy of education
• Details best practice for TBLT programs, including discussion of learner needs and means analysis; syllabus design; materials writing; choice of methodological principles and pedagogic procedures; criterion-referenced, task-based performance assessment; and program evaluation
• Written by an esteemed scholar of second language acquisition with over 30 years of research and classroom experience
• Considers diffusion of innovation in education and the potential impact of TBLT on foreign and second language learning

Part One
Theory and Research

Chapter 1
Why TBLT?

---

1. 1.1. The importance of second language learning and teaching in the twenty-first century
2. 1.2. TBLT and the meaning of ‘task’
3. 1.3. A rationale for TBLT
   1. 1.3.1. Consistency with SLA theory and research findings
   2. 1.3.2. Basis in philosophy of education
   3. 1.3.3. Accountability
   4. 1.3.4. Relevance
   5. 1.3.5. Avoidance of known problems with existing approaches
   6. 1.3.6. Learner-centeredness
   7. 1.3.7. Functionality
4. 1.4. Summary
5. 1.5. Suggested readings

---

1.1. The Importance of Second Language Learning and Teaching in the Twenty-First Century

Second language learning and teaching are more important in the twenty-first century than ever before and are more important than even many language teachers appreciate. Most of us are familiar with traditional student populations: captive school children required to “pass” a foreign language (often for no obvious reason), college students satisfying a language requirement or working toward a BA in literature, young adults headed overseas for university courses, as missionaries or to serve as volunteers in the Peace Corps and similar organizations, and adults needing a L2 for vocational training or occupational purposes in the business world, aid organizations, the military, federal and state government, or the diplomatic and intelligence services. Typically, these students are literate, well educated, relatively affluent, learning a major world language, and, the school children aside, doing so voluntarily.

Less visible to many of us, but often with even more urgent linguistic needs, are the steadily increasing numbers of involuntary language learners of all ages. Each year, millions of people are forced to cross linguistic borders to escape wars, despotic regimes, disease, drought, famine, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, abject poverty, and climate change. Many of these learners are poor, illiterate, uneducated, and faced with acquiring less powerful, often unwritten, rarely taught languages. In some instances, for example, migrant workers in Western Europe, the United States, and parts of the Arab world, the target language is an economically and politically powerful one, such as French, Spanish, German, English, or Arabic. Instruction is available for those with money and time to pursue it, but many such learners lack either. Worse, marginalized and living in a linguistic ghetto, they frequently have little or no access to target language speakers, interaction with whom could serve as the basis for naturalistic second language acquisition (SLA). In some cases, involuntary learners are not created by people moving into new linguistic zones but by powerful languages coming to them. When imperialist nation states use military force to annex territory, they typically oblige the inhabitants to learn the language of the occupier if they hope to have access to education, economic opportunity, or political power, often while relegating local languages to second-class status or even making their use illegal.¹

The overall picture is unlikely to change anytime soon. Advanced proficiency in a foreign or second language will remain a critical factor in determining the educational and economic life chances of all these groups, from college students and middle-class professionals, through humanitarian aid workers and government and military personnel, to migrant workers, their school-age children, and the victims of occupations and colonization. Moreover, if the obvious utilitarian reasons were not important enough, for millions of learners, especially the non-volunteers, acquiring a new language is inextricably bound up with creating a new identity and acculturating into the receiving community. Occasionally, SLA is a path to resistance for them (“Know thine enemy's language”), but in all too many cases, it is simply necessary for survival. For all these reasons, and given the obvious political implications of a few major world languages being taught to speakers of so many less powerful ones, a responsible course of action, it seems to me, as with education in general, is to make sure that language teaching (LT) and learning are as socially progressive as possible. LT alone will never compensate for the ills that create so many language learners, but at the very least, it should strive not to make matters worse.

It is clear from the above examples – just a few of many possible – that the scope of second and foreign language learning and teaching in the twenty-first century is expanding and likely to continue to do so, and as varied as it is vast. Given the importance of language learning for so many people and so many different kinds of people, therefore, it would be reassuring to know that LT is being carried out efficiently by trained professionals and that language teachers and learners alike are satisfied with the end product. In fact, there is little evidence for either supposition. While individual programs are professionally staffed and producing good results, they are the exception. Around the world, people continue to learn languages in many ways, sometimes, it appears, with the help of instruction, sometimes without it, sometimes despite it, but there are many more beginners than finishers, and as described in Chapter 2, the field remains divided on fundamental issues to a degree that would cause public consternation and generate costly lawsuits in true professions.²

Against this backdrop, it seems reasonable to suggest that new proposals for LT should strive to meet some minimum criteria, with the justification for any serious approach needing to be multi-faceted. Since language learning is the process LT is designed to facilitate, an essential part of the rationale must surely be psycholinguistic plausibility, or consistency with theory and research findings about how people learn and use second and foreign languages. But that is by no means the only motivation required. Given that the subject is language education, a solid basis in the philosophy of education should be expected too. Also of major importance are accountability, relevance, avoidance of known problems with existing approaches, learner-centeredness, and functionality. This book is about Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), an approach to course design, implementation, and evaluation intended to meet the communicative needs of diverse groups of learners and which attempts to satisfy all seven criteria. But first, what exactly is meant by “task-based”?

1.2. TBLT and the Meaning of ‘Task’

Throughout this book, I distinguish between “Task-Based Language Teaching” (upper case), as in the book's title, and “task-based language teaching” (lower case). The reason is simple. I developed my initial ideas for (upper case) TBLT in courses at the University of Pennsylvania from 1980 to 1982, and first presented them publicly in a plenary talk at the Georgetown Round Table in Washington, D.C., in 1983. The paper subsequently appeared in print as Long (1985a). As so often happens in applied linguistics, however, it was not long before the original proposals were diluted, changed beyond recognition in some cases, and repackaged in a form more acceptable to the powerful political and commercial interests that exert enormous influence over the way LT is conducted worldwide.³

As described in detail in subsequent chapters, TBLT starts with a task-based needs analysis to identify the target tasks for a particular group of learners – what they need to be able to do in the new language. In other words, ‘task’ in TBLT has its normal, non-technical meaning. Tasks are the real-world activities people think of when planning, conducting, or recalling their day. That can mean things like brushing their teeth, preparing breakfast, reading a newspaper, taking a child to school, responding to e-mail messages, making a sales call, attending a lecture or a business meeting, having lunch with a colleague from work, helping a child with homework, coaching a soccer team, and watching a TV program. Some tasks are mundane, some complex. Some require language use, some do not; for others, it is optional. (For more details on definitions and types of tasks, see Chapter 5, Section 5.5.1.)

After undergoing some modifications, the tasks are used as the content of a task syllabus, which consists of a series of progressively more complex pedagogic tasks. Pedagogic tasks are the activities and the materials that teachers and/or students work on in the classroom or other instructional environment. ‘Task’ is the unit of analysis throughout the design, implementation, and evaluation of a TBLT program, including the way student achievement is assessed – by task-based, criterion-referenced performance tests. TBLT is an analytic approach, with a focus on form (see Chapter 2).

In sharp contrast, by the late 1990s, “TBLT” (lower case) as manifested in commercially published pedagogic textbooks and some handbooks for teachers involved “classroom tasks” – often little more than activities and exercises relabeled as tasks (another example of the meaning of a construct being diluted in applied linguistics) – usually unrelated to students' real-world activities beyond the classroom. These counterfeit “tasks” are used to practice structures (see, e.g., Fotos & Ellis 1991), functions or sub-skills in a traditional grammatical, notional-functional, or skills-based syllabus delivered using linguistically simplified materials, with classroom methodology to match, that is, what I call focus on forms. Role-playing a job interview, for example, might be chosen not because job interviews in the L2 were target tasks for a group of learners but because they provided opportunities for practicing question forms. Skehan (an advocate of genuine TBLT) refers to such activities as “structure-trapping” tasks. Ellis (1997) refers to them as “consciousness-raising” tasks or “focused” tasks (Ellis 2003, p. 141).

The syllabus in (lower case) tblt is not task-based at all in the sense understood in (upper case) TBLT; in other words; it is an overt or covert linguistic (usually a grammatical) syllabus, and the syllabus, methodology, materials, and tests are what Wilkins (1974) called synthetic, not analytic. In what Ellis (2003, p. 65) and others refer to as task-supported, as distinct from task-based, LT, “focused tasks” are used for the final “produce” stage of a traditional present–practice–produce (sic.) (PPP) approach, with an overt or covert grammatical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part One: Theory and Research
• Part Two: Design and Implementation
• Part Three: The Road Ahead
• References
• Appendix: List of Abbreviations
• Index
• End User License Agreement