Looking Back

In Chapter 1 I pointed out that task-based language teaching has quite a short history. It grew out of the communicative language teaching movement of the 1970s but did not really establish itself as a distinctive approach until the 1990s. It would, however, be wrong to suggest that tasks did not figure in language pedagogy before that. In the 1960s I was an English teacher in a new rural secondary school in Zambia. Although much of what I and other teachers at the school did was based on a structural approach, we also made frequent use of what I would now call ‘tasks’. For example, we would invite a student to pretend to be a character in a story book and ask the other students to fire questions at him/her which had to be answered in character. We would design reading comprehension activities where students had to complete a map showing the route described in the text. We would make use of situational composition exercises, where students had to write a report based on the minutes of meetings. I would definitely call these activities ‘tasks’ as they clearly satisfied my four criteria for a task (see Chapter 1). However, although we included tasks in our teaching, we did not build our whole programme around tasks. We just made eclectic use of ‘tasks’ in some of our lessons. I am sure that most teachers have always done this.

What is innovative about task-based language teaching, then, is not ‘tasks’ but rather the idea that a language course can consist of nothing but tasks – that there is no need to teach the language directly because learners do better if they acquire it incidentally by performing tasks supported by focus-on-form. For many teachers this is a radical way of going about teaching. It requires them to abandon long-held views about what language is and their beliefs about the importance of directing what learners should learn and when they should learn it.