While much of the rationale for task-based language teaching and learning focuses on the effective features of individual tasks (see, for example, Willis & Willis, 2007), Benevides (2010: 22) argues that weaving task-based learning experiences together into a ‘themed, task-based’ curriculum allows for the ‘development of meaningful contexts and content wherein relatively authentic communicative language acts can take place’. Over the year of study, in the regular English lessons of which I was a teacher, learners had ‘worked’ at an imaginary company that developed new technological products using the textbook Widgets (Benevides & Valvona, 2008). They had been involved in various groupings, using English to create their own original technological product ideas, had selected some of these to ‘go into production’, and had improved the designs and features of these products (see Appendix A for a brief outline of the English course). As a final assignment, the groups created and video-recorded short advertisements to ‘sell’ the products. Across the last six weekly English lessons of the academic year, student groups worked on this final project, preparing, recording and finally showing a four-minute video that combined information plus persuasive situations – an ‘infomercial’ – advertising one of the new, imaginary products that they and other students had developed over the year (see Appendix G for more details of the project).

Although every class group exhibits collective behaviour in different forms, the writing by participants about this project and the final lesson in which they shared their infomercials revealed very clearly a kind of novelty at the whole-class group level that de Wolf and Holvoet (2005) argue is representative of emergence in a complex system. De Wolf and Holvoet (2005: 3) write that complex systems exhibit emergence when ‘... there are coherent emergents at the macro-level that dynamically arise from the interactions between the parts at the micro-level. Such emergents are novel w.r.t. [with respect to] the individual parts of the system.