The unit is divided into six activity cycles designed to take, on average, two hours each. Activity cycles 2 to 5 are the core units which you need to complete for a good practical understanding of TBL. Activity cycle 1 revisits some of the materials covered in Module 2 ('How students learn languages'), so you may prefer to treat this as optional, or a quick revision of the key issues. Activity cycle 6 is also optional, but useful if you want to introduce TBL and feel you may anticipate resistance from students, colleagues, directors of studies or others, or wonder how TBL can fit with an existing set book or syllabus. The two optional activity cycles should each take under an hour, depending on how long you spend on the suggested 'action points' and optional reading. Unless you are already familiar with TBL, it is probably best to work through the activities in order.

In addition, you may spend a further twelve hours or so designing the task-based materials, planning a series of task-based lessons etc, and writing short commentaries on these, plus half an hour for the set reading. If you choose to follow up the optional reading suggestions, you will spend a further hour or two per activity cycle on reading.

Because this module considers an entire approach to language teaching, it covers a much broader range of material than other DELPHI modules, and will almost certainly take longer to complete than a typical module. However, there are many areas of overlap between parts of this module and others - for example, the section on text-based tasks has much in common with Modules 6 and 7, on developing reading and working with written texts. If you have already completed other related modules, your work on this module will be much easier. Conversely, if you do this module in advance of other related modules, you will be doing useful preparation for later study.