4.4.2.1 Reflection
4.4.2.2 Belief check
4.4.2.3 Presentation methodologies
4.4.2.4 Communicative competence versus knowledge about language (KAL)
4.4.2.5 Problems of presentation methodologies
4.4.2.6 Focusing on form before production
4.4.2.7 Optional reading
4.4.2.8 TBL and language acquisition
4.4.2.9 Integrated skills and form focus
4.4.2.10 Sequence of stages in a TBL lesson
4.4.2.11 Flexibility of the framework
4.4.2.12 Example TBL lesson plan
4.4.2.13 Optional reading

4.4.2.1 Reflection
Think of a lesson you taught recently, and which contained some kind of focus on language (ie not just a skills practice lesson, or a conversation class). Try to recall and jot down the main stages of the lesson. At what point did the 'language focus' occur? Was it towards the beginning or end of the lesson? What were the other stages? Why did you plan your lesson with the stages in this order? Compare notes with a colleague if you can.

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4.4.2.2 Belief check
If you are going to include a task or tasks in a language lesson, at what stage do you believe these should be done: beginning, middle or end? What sort of activities (if any) do you think should come before and/or after the task?

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4.4.2.3 Presentation methodologies
A common approach to introducing new language to students is to do so through a presentation methodology of some kind, as has been the case for almost as long as languages have been taught!

By presentation methodology I mean a teaching sequence that begins with a presentation of the new language that students are to learn. In recent years, there has been a move to contextualize the new language and to introduce structure inductively, that is, to give students plenty of examples containing the 'structure or function of the day' and help them to work out the rule or usage and meaning for themselves, but the aim is nevertheless to reveal and focus on a pre-selected rule or language function. The students then engage in practice activities to help them to become confident with the structure and commit it to memory so that they can then use it, and they are often expected to do so by the end of the lesson during a 'production' or 'free phase'.

Of course, there are many variations on this basic sequence of present, practise, produce, but the underlying notion is the same: you can select an item to be taught, a 'learnable chunk' of language, which is taken from a syllabus of such items that have been organized into an 'order of difficulty' and you make it known to the students. Their job is to learn it and then use it. The item to be learned is usually identified quite explicitly in the aims of a lesson plan or at the start of a course-book unit, along the lines of 'by the end of the lesson, students will be able to talk about the past using regular simple past verb forms'. But by pre-selecting what the students are to learn in any given lesson, we are almost certainly ensuring the failure of the lesson, if by 'learn' we mean acquire an item so that it is available for spontaneous production.

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4.4.2.4 Communicative competence versus knowledge about language (KAL)
A presentation approach to grammar is fine if you want students to know the rules of grammar. By the end of a lesson, they may well have consciously learned a rule, such as how to make regular simple past forms of verbs, at least in the short term. But I'm assuming that in most cases, conscious rule-learning is not the goal of the language programme. The goal is to enable students to use the language communicatively, and consciously knowing a rule does not mean the rule is available as part of the learner's subconscious system during spontaneous language use. Knowledge about language (KAL) and communicative competence are not the same thing, and it seems that somewhere along the line, syllabus planners and other 'experts' have confused learning a language and learning about a language.

One response to the failure of grammar presentation has been the introduction of functional-notional syllabuses, where instead of grammar rules, students are taught the different ways that various communicative functions are performed (eg 'giving advice') or notions are expressed (eg 'time'). This approach seems to have been equally problematic, as students often develop highly effective strategies for communicating using key words and functional phrases, but fail to develop their grammatical competence, with the result that teachers and examiners alike are frustrated by their students' lack of accuracy.

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4.4.2.5 Problems of presentation methodologies
Now many people believe that KAL can become communicative competence, or at least help in the development of communicative competence, and this may well be true, but if it is, then the type of KAL we develop in our classes should support and speed up the acquisition process, not compete with it. (For an explanation of the difference between acquisition and learning, see Module 2.)

Even if grammar experts agreed that they had between them arrived at a full and accurate description of any given language (which they have not, so we may actually be teaching inadequate rules!), we have no way of knowing that this description matches the way that language is stored and processed in the mind. (Recent work suggests that rather than calling on rules to construct utterances each time we speak, we in fact store tens or even hundreds of thousands of pre-fabricated chunks of language, and we recall quite large chunks as fixed or semi-fixed units with very little recourse to grammar rules).

Furthermore, the order in which we teach (and expect students to accumulate) language is organized not by order of difficulty of learning (which is not actually known), but by approximate order of difficulty of explanation and teaching. For example, the third person singular s of English present simple verbs (he/she makes, eats, etc) is very easy to demonstrate and 'teach', and is usually covered very early on in a course, but is notoriously resistant to being learned, and even advanced level students of EFL will often omit it during spontaneous speech. In other words, there are serious questions to be asked about the assumptions upon which presentation methodologies are based, in terms of their underlying structural view of language, the inadequacy of the descriptions for language structure currently available, the view that language can be learned as a pre-determined series of isolated chunks, and the view that formal KAL leads to development of communicative competence.

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4.4.2.6 Focusing on form before production
You may remember from activity cycle 2 (see 4.2) what Jane Willis has to say about what happens if you have a task, or production activity, at the end of a lesson, after there has been some kind of presentation of language. Here is the video clip again:

Transcript:JW10
It depends an awful lot on what's happened before. If the teacher has introduced a particular grammar point, or maybe ways of expressing a particular notion or function, and then they're given a chance to do a task, some students may see that as purely a chance to display the language that they've just been taught and to try to use examples of that, and they won't really be meaning what they say, they'll be thinking, 'Ah, OK, I need to use this form'. And other students might think, 'Oh, OK, we've got to do this task, so I've got to tell my friend what I might be doing at the weekend', and they might forget everything that they've just been taught, and might just do it with whatever language they have because they'll be focussing on meaning. [Corony: So then that task would have no relation to the rest of the lesson?] It may not have any relation to the rest of the lesson. And I've actually watched lessons where teachers have said, 'So I taught them the language and when they did the task, they didn't use any of it!' and looked really surprised. And to them, that was a failed lesson. But in fact that just shows how, if they're focusing on meaning, they're using whatever language is already, how shall I say, part of their interlanguage system, and it takes them much longer to learn a new structure than just one minute or two minutes. So if they're really thinking about meaning, and the language that's been taught to them is actually new to them, it's very unlikely they will use it.

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4.4.2.7 Optional reading
Now would be a good time to do the first part of the recommended reading for this activity cycle( see 4.4.9, Reading 1).

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4.4.2.8 TBL and language acquisition
A task-based lesson framework attempts to integrate language awareness raising* and language acquisition by avoiding a presentation mentality in three important ways:

[*Language awareness is not synonymous with KAL, but is closely related to it. See van Lier's chapter in Carter and Nunan (1989) for an overview of this topic.]

• First, TBL does not assume that we can select what learners will acquire (since the language acquisition part of our brains seems to have a mind of its own in this respect!). Rather, it provides learners with plenty of opportunities for motivated, meaningful input (exposure) and language use (pushed output) from which they will acquire whatever they are ready for - whether grammatical structures or lexical chunks or something else.
  
  
• Second, TBL views Language Awareness (LA) work as a way of helping students to notice language features, so they can begin to reformulate their hypotheses about how the target language operates. There will be more on how this is achieved in section 4.4.6.
  
  
• Thirdly, and of central interest in this activity cycle, TBL follows a series of lesson stages that does not begin with presentation of language, since this would set a fixed learning agenda for the whole lesson. Language focus work arises naturally from the task that students do and any related language exposure they receive.

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4.4.2.9 Integrated skills and form focus
In addition, a task-based framework allows integrated language skills practice that is also linked with a focus on language form. This is something that does not always explicitly occur in conventional 'skills' lessons, even though students are highly likely to want to know how to say something beyond their current level of competence during productive skills work, or will ask for explanations of language they hear or read during receptive skills work.

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4.4.2.10 Sequence of stages in a TBL lesson
The following diagram represents the basic sequence of stages in a task-based lesson. Make a sketch or print of the diagram and fill in the spaces on the dotted lines, using the words or phrases from the box.

What might students hear a recording of? (Activity cycle 3 holds the answer!)

For feedback, see Commentary 4.4.1.

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4.4.2.11 Flexibility of the framework
The framework presented above is just that - a framework - which means it can be adapted for different types of task, or a series of mini-tasks, with different stages occupying differing amounts of time in the lesson depending on the level of the learners, their age, and so on. If lesson periods are short, the pre-task and task stages can be completed in one lesson, ending with the playing of the recording, and the next lesson can cover the language focus, beginning with the same recording. In activity cycle 5 (see 4.5), you will meet variations on this basic framework when tasks are text-based.

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4.4.2.12 Example TBL lesson plan
Here is my plan for the 'mystery objects' lesson. Identify which stages of my lesson go with which stage of the framework.

For feedback on this task, see Commentary 4.4.2.

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4.4.2.13 Optional reading
Now would be a good point to do the second piece of suggested reading (see 4.4.9, Reading 2).

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