Since Brumfit's landmark definition of applied linguistics as the theoretical and empirical study of real world problems in which language plays a central role (Brumfit, Reference Brumfit2000), there have been periodic calls for applied linguistics to engage with problems experienced by people in real world contexts (such as teaching, health, business, law, social services, business or family), rather than problems of research methodology originating in the research community, and to work to address them, both in policy and practice (Bygate, Reference Bygate2004; Tarone, Reference Tarone2013, Reference Tarone2015; Shuy, Reference Shuy2015; Widdowson, Reference Widdowson2017). This principle may well apply to all areas of applied linguistics, but in this piece I would like to explore it in relation to task-based language teaching (TBLT). This is because while TBLT is characteristically defined in terms of the needs and interests of language teachers and learners, it is also informed by research, which is heavily shaped by the priorities of the academy, an influence which can lead it away from some of its real world objectives. Yet if proponents fail to adequately address the priorities and needs of classroom stakeholders, proposals will be doomed to failure, a point acknowledged by many (see inter alia Gatbonton and Segalowitz (Reference Gatbonton and Segalowitz1988, Reference Gatbonton and Segalowitz2005), Edwards and Willis (Reference Edwards and Willis2005), Thornbury and Slade (Reference Thornbury and Slade2006), van den Branden (Reference van den Branden2006), Eckerth (Reference Eckerth, Eckerth and Siekmann2008), Andon and Eckerth (Reference Andon and Eckerth2009), Ellis (Reference Ellis2009), Gatbonton (Reference Gatbonton2015), Long (Reference Long2015) and Samuda, Bygate, and van den Branden (Reference Samuda, Bygate, van den Branden, Samuda, van den Branden and Bygate2018)). That is, research needs to engage not just with models of second language acquisition (SLA), but with the practices, demands, pressures, and perspectives of stakeholders in real world language classrooms.
Elsewhere (Bygate, Reference Bygate2016, Reference Bygate, Ahmadian and Garcia Mayo2018a, Reference Bygate and Bygate2018b, Reference Bygate and Alonso2018c) I have argued that since tasks are intended as a central means of shaping learning and teaching, it is necessary to understand the language learning opportunities offered by particular tasks (what might be termed ‘task content’) so that they can be combined in a principled way, and systematically supported and complemented by other learning activities. In this paper, however, I suggest that three further issues need to be addressed if TBLT is to survive as a serious basis for orienting the teaching of languages: first, to demonstrate how tasks offer a genuine portal for learners to access the broad scope of a target language; second, to provide a fuller account of how the use of tasks can facilitate the broad range of language learning processes and strategies generally recognised as effective and liable to be used; and third, to develop a dynamic whereby TBLT research can evolve into an ongoing collaborative project involving the stakeholders on whom the future of TBLT as an educational project depends.
1. The problem
TBLT can be thought of as a project (van den Branden, Bygate, & Norris, Reference van den Branden, Bygate, Norris, van den Branden, Bygate and Norris2009) that proposes the use of communication tasks as the main element to structure a language curriculum and its implementation (Long & Crookes, Reference Long, Crookes, Crookes and Gass1993; Skehan, Reference Skehan1998; Ellis, Reference Ellis2003; Samuda & Bygate, Reference Samuda and Bygate2008; Long, Reference Long2015). It has been seen as relevant not only for short intensive courses, but for entire national curricula worldwide. Thus the proposal is ambitious. However, although one strand of research reports implementation of TBLT within ongoing language programmes (e.g. van den Branden, Reference van den Branden2006; Müller-Hartmann & Schocker-von Ditfurth, Reference Müller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth2011; Gatbonton, Reference Gatbonton2015), currently the project is mainly underpinned by research into how tasks potentially activate SLA processes. Although this has generated several valuable lines of research following early work by Long (Reference Long1983), Pica and Doughty (Reference Pica and Doughty1985), Varonis and Gass (Reference Varonis and Gass1985) and Pica (Reference Pica1987), its strengths and limitations are starting to become clearer, and so despite the volume of publications to date, TBLT is yet to fulfil its promise as a free-standing approach to second language education, endorsed not only by researchers but also by teachers and other stakeholders. For example, concluding an investigation into experienced teachers' attitudes to TBLT, Andon (Reference Andon, Samuda, Van den Branden and Bygate2018) wonders what would be needed to convince them that TBLT is worth adopting. Reflecting the experience of working as a teacher educator, Baralt (Reference Baralt, Samuda, Van den Branden and Bygate2018) reports on some of the challenges she found in moving from being a successful TBLT researcher to initiating and supporting teachers in the adoption of TBLT.
From these and other studies (e.g. Carless, Reference Carless2003, Reference Carless2004; Nguyen, Reference Nguyen2012; Erlam, Reference Erlam2015), it is apparent that there is a fundamental challenge in translating the TBLT project from research and theory to the widespread practice that its proponents claim for it. It is not my purpose here to convince the reader that TBLT should be widely adopted, since the case for TBLT has been extensively debated elsewhere. Instead, I wish to argue for the need for research to better address the needs and concerns of those it is intended to be used by. And so, although it is right to celebrate the achievements of TBLT research, it is appropriate and timely to consider what it is that research has not so far managed to address, and what might be needed if the project is to progress.
2. Some limitations in TBLT research agendas
A central problem concerns the narrowness of the scope of research into TBLT. Although research programmes are bound to limit their focus, a project such as TBLT must be accountable not just to particular theories of language acquisition, but also to the wider responsibilities implicated in the teaching of a language, in particular how the approach facilitates access to the language curriculum; how it can help activate the broad range of learning processes useful in learning a language; and how it engages with the socio-professional context it aims to serve.
2.1 Limitations of TBLT research in relation to the language curriculum
To convince teachers and other stakeholders about the adoption of TBLT, a first concern must be to show how the approach can facilitate access to the different aspects of the target language – that is to the language curriculum. However, the various aspects of language to be learnt (pronunciation, grammatical resources, vocabulary, conventional discourse patterns) have not been a prior concern in TBLT research. For instance, Interaction Hypothesis (IH) research, widely cited in SLA-based studies of TBLT, has predominantly explored patterns of interaction likely to have an impact on acquisition, resulting in a focus on the impact of ‘negotiation for meaning’ sequences or recasts on acquisition, and their relationships with factors such as working memory capacity. This focus is largely indifferent to the aspects of language being negotiated, and studies on the learning of particular features of a language have been rare (though see Mackey, Reference Mackey1999). Instead IH studies were always intended to investigate the impact of interaction patterns on language learning in general rather than how tasks might facilitate access to – or activation of – particular domains of a target language. This is perhaps not surprising given that Long (e.g. Reference Long2015) among others has consistently argued that tasks should not be used with a language agenda in mind, on grounds of the readiness hypothesis (Long, Reference Long2015) (which argues that many grammatical features should not be taught until the learner is ready to learn them), and that therefore particular language features should only be focused on reactively at an individual's point of need during communication (an approach which of course poses practical problems in classrooms where at any given time each learner could be at a different level of readiness, and thus at odds with the structuring of any syllabus or language curriculum). And Long's position is endorsed by Skehan, who labels the use of tasks to target domains of language ‘structure-trapping’. However, avoiding structure-trapping is not incompatible with an account of how tasks can map to a full range of language domains, an issue I return to later.
Another example of the narrowness of much widely cited TBLT research can be found in the complexity, accuracy, lexis, fluency (CALF) studies which have focused on how the complexity, accuracy, lexis and fluency of a learner's language is influenced in the performance of particular tasks under different processing conditions (the most well known being the presence or absence of planning (Ellis, Reference Ellis2005)). However, the measures used in CALF studies are generic, so that they report only overall fluency, accuracy and complexity scores with little attention to the acquisition of particular domains of language. This too contributes to a potential disconnect between research and practice. Other strands of TBLT research do not escape this criticism. One instance is task repetition (TR) studies, in which I have personally had a long interest: few TR studies to date have been concerned with the scope of language with which TR cycles are able to engage learners.
Another example of how the activation of specific domains of language has been neglected is found in complex/dynamic systems theory (C/DST) research, where the main concern is to study patterns (such as the occurrence of plateaux, regressions, or the appearance of new structures) in the evolution of a learner's language over time. Thus the focus is on the processes of change rather than the problems posed by particular domains of a language. This limitation is also found in TBLT research undertaken from a socio-cultural theory (SCT) perspective, where interest is in the co-construction processes that arise in communication between learners, or between learners and teacher, and the gradual processes of appropriation arising as learners progressively internalise language co-constructed with an interlocutor. A further instance of the lack of attention to language domains is in research carried out from a usage-based linguistics (UBL) perspective, which explores the importance of actual usage in the acquisition and shaping of language knowledge, highlighting the nature of the acquisitional process (how the use of language in general can impact on learning) rather than the relationship between tasks and the language curriculum. The fact is, of course, that all these approaches to TBLT research are more interested in the underlying processes of language learning than in how tasks might help learners access the breadth of a target language. This is not to denigrate the value of such work, but rather to raise questions about the adequacy of its explanatory scope as a basis for the adoption of TBLT in real world contexts.
It could of course be argued that the main reason for this state of affairs is that all these orientations are varieties of SLA research and thus inevitably prioritise a focus on learning processes, over any concern with the aspects of the language being learnt. Yet an interest in acquisitional processes is not by definition incompatible with understanding how they engage with different domains of language – how, for instance, cohesive features of discourse, or framing of stories, the formulation of bargaining moves, the expression of apologies or requests, the functions of aspects such as the present perfect, or the use of prosodic features, can be learnt by working on tasks. All are essential concerns for language teaching programmes. It is an important limitation in research aspiring to promote the use of tasks for language teaching that it has neglected to explore how tasks can offer a portal enabling learners to engage with the topography of a target language.
2.2 Some limitations of TBLT research in relation to learning
TBLT research has also adopted a restricted perspective on language learning. In line with much SLA research over the last 45 years, TBLT researchers have sought to understand how a language can be acquired through communication, on the assumption that learning language for communication depends on learning it through communication. To this end, TBLT has focused on tasks as a means of promoting communication in the target language, and specifically on the extent to which engagement with tasks requiring communication for their completion can facilitate effective language development. Yet in exploring communication in such contexts, how far has TBLT research really engaged with the breadth of human language learning?
Here a thought experiment might be useful, in response to a simple question: how far can a teacher be expected to rely on the learning processes explored by the strands of TBLT research summarised above for teaching a language? One's response is bound at the least to be uneasy. For instance, how far would one as a learner or teacher be willing to entrust the learning of a language to processes explored in IH research? How much of our (or our learners') time would we be willing to devote to negotiating meaning and deriving input and uptake through recasts? How long could we maintain the process of negotiating meaning, or managing recasts in a single lesson? And indeed how much faith would we place in our learners' ability to retain the language that was negotiated or recast? These questions are not intended to imply that recasts and negotiation for meaning are unhelpful, but rather that the IH cannot be expected to bear the whole load of the language learning process (for a similar argument, see Swan, Reference Swan2018, pp. 253–255 and his remarks about a ‘simplicity bias’ (Reference Swan2018, p. 255)). Indeed, as Ellis (Reference Ellis2016) has recently shown, the conceptualization of focus on form that is now adopted by IH researchers has in fact broadened to include a wide range of other learning processes (such as accepting the value of intentional learning, the use of explicit grammar rules, and of acquisition being not simply interaction based (p. 408)). More recently Ellis (personal communication) argues for a broadening of the way we research the impact of teaching procedures such as providing corrective feedback, by using what he refers to as an ‘idiographic approach (longitudinal, contextual, with a focus on the individual teacher and students)’ in order to explore more thoroughly the complex ways in which a pedagogic procedure can function. Although learners and teachers would not be surprised at this broadening, they might be surprised by the relative recency that it has been taken on board by researchers.
By the same token, the same questions apply to the pedagogic use of co-construction, the focus of SCT research, or in the CALF studies to the use or withdrawal of planning time to promote the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of second language learners' language. And while language learning does certainly involve the complexification and increasing control of a learner's different communicative capacities, fluency, accuracy, and complexity are nonetheless all qualities of surface performance, and hence their development says little about many of the underlying learning processes that teachers and learners are likely to be interested in, such as inferencing, predicting, analogysing, repeating, rehearsing, contextualising, and memorising.
Robinson's (Reference Robinson and Bygate2015) complexity hypothesis is also structured around a single aspect of learning – the complexification of skill mastery. His is one of the few theories to offer an account of how a learner might increase fluency, accuracy and complexity through a sequence of increasingly complex versions of a task. One virtue of this approach is that it provides an account of how acquisition can progress within the context of a communicative activity. Nonetheless like other SLA-derived TBLT theories, this perspective engages a relatively narrow range of learning processes, ignoring many of those enumerated above. The focus on the communication-based aspect of a task as motor for language development precludes attention to other potentially valuable learning processes.
Finally, turning to usage-based linguistics (UBL), in Eskildson's words this approach proposes that ‘long-term language learning is best conceived of as an embodied, frequency and saliency-based process of accumulating and appropriating a variety of semiotic resources, that is, form–meaning pairings […], on the basis of concrete exemplars encountered and put to meaningful use in real-life situations’ (Reference Eskildsen2015, p. 34). UBL is an approach then that sees tasks as providing contexts in which different unit-chunks can be encountered and internalised – indeed a methodological principle proposed by Long (Reference Long2015, pp. 307–317). This perspective on language learning highlights among other things the importance of meaningful repetition – something which would have clear implications for the selection and sequencing of tasks. Yet although this is obviously an important pedagogical principle, once again it does not – nor does it intend to – address the broad range of learning processes that can be expected to be needed and activated when learning a language.
Thus each of the SLA-based approaches to TBLT research has in its own way prioritised a particular perspective on learning. This is not necessarily a failing on the part of any particular group of researchers. Yet when seen in relation to the needs, background knowledge, and expectations of the real world community of teachers and learners, these limitations amount to a potentially critical gap between TBLT research and real world stakeholders. It could be objected that research perspectives are bound to end up addressing only part of the puzzle of language and language learning, yet any lack of congruence is bound to complicate the relationship between theoretically driven research and real world practice. Any such difficulties become particularly glaring when we consider the problematic nature of the relationship between research and real world pedagogic contexts, my third concern.
2.3 Some limitations of TBLT research in relation to pedagogic contexts
In 1993 Crookes and Gass co-edited a volume of studies entitled Tasks in pedagogic context intended to highlight the educational orientation of TBLT. However, despite this intention and the title of the volume, only one of the six chapters is an empirical study of tasks within a classroom context, and that one (Samuda & Rounds, Reference Samuda, Rounds, Crookes and Gass1993) does not make explicit that key data did indeed come from groups working on regular materials in a regular class. One other of the chapters (Murphy, Reference Murphy, Crookes and Gass1993) acknowledges the notion ‘that teachers should investigate aspects of what goes on in their classrooms’ (p. 139) – but then presents non-classroom-based data so that in the end, as Murphy admits, the report ‘does not represent an examination of TBL per se’ (pp. 139–140). The remaining chapters, although all still important today in the TBLT literature, are essentially programmatic.
The lack of classroom-based research found in that 1993 volume of researching TBLT in practice has persisted. The title of García Mayo's (Reference Garcia Mayo2007) edited volume entitled Investigating tasks in formal language learning suggests a collection of papers investigating TBLT in institutional contexts. Yet none of the papers in the collection explicitly claims to study TBLT as taught with regular materials in regular classes, and most make clear that they adopt experimental designs.
Some more recent volumes such as McDonough and Mackey (Reference McDonough and Mackey2013) (again significantly entitled Second language interaction in diverse educational contexts) come close to meeting the criterion of exploiting ‘regular materials in regular programmes’ but fall short, with few of the task-based studies (notably those by Kim, Reference Kim, McDonough and Mackey2013; Wagner & Toth, Reference Wagner, Toth, McDonough and Mackey2013; Collentine & Collentine, Reference Collentine, Collentine, McDonough and Mackey2013; Sauro, Reference Sauro, McDonough and Mackey2013) gathering data from regular intact classes, though even two of these (Reference Kim, McDonough and MackeyKim and Reference Wagner, Toth, McDonough and MackeyWagner & Toth) used specially designed materials that were not part of the regular curriculum. Leaving aside those chapters which do not involve the use of tasks, the remainder use either specially designed activities, volunteer students, and/or special pairings of students sometimes on the basis of a preliminary language test. So although collections such as this do engage genuine cohorts of learners on activities that are, or could be, used in regular classes, their overall focus is on task-based performance and outcomes of activities specially designed and administered. The same applies to many of the studies in the recent special issues of Language Teaching Research (2016) and TESOL Quarterly (2017) devoted to TBLT.
Of course, there are powerful influences which make it hard to undertake TBLT research in ongoing programmes. Programmes using TBLT or setting up the particular phenomena of interest to researchers may not be accessible, and teachers usually have little spare capacity to participate in research projects. Yet exploring TBLT in real life pedagogical contexts is not impossible: studies such as those reported by Lynch and Maclean (Reference Lynch and Maclean2000, Reference Lynch, Maclean, Bygate, Skehan and Swain2001), Shintani (Reference Shintani2016), Kobayashi and Kobayashi (Reference Kobayashi, Kobayashi and Bygate2018), Lynch (Reference Lynch and Bygate2018) and Nitta and Baba (Reference Nitta, Baba and Bygate2018), were carried out by teacher-researchers focusing on activities that formed part of normal ongoing language programmes, while some have engaged with TBLT in taught programmes, such as van den Branden (Reference van den Branden2006), Müller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth (Reference Müller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth2011), Andon (Reference Andon, Samuda, Van den Branden and Bygate2018) and Vandommele, van den Branden, and Van Gorp (Reference Vandommele, van den Branden, Van Gorp, Samuda, van den Branden and Bygate2018). In relation to the bulk of research such studies are rare, but the ones cited here do offer a way forward.
3. Addressing the problem
3.1 Broadening TBLT as an approach to language
3.1.1 Teaching approaches and the target language topography
In trying to move forward, it can be useful to recall how language teaching methodology evolved in part so as to gradually account more adequately for the nature of language. This dynamic can help explain developments from the grammar-translation approach, through audiolingualism, the situational approach, then via approaches that were structured around the notions and functions of language, to those which were essentially discourse oriented e.g. the Reading and thinking in English course books (Widdowson, Reference Widdowson1979–1980; Swales's, Reference Swales1990 genre approach), as well as approaches which claimed to be lexically driven (see also Long, Reference Long2015, chapter 2).
This historical evolution can be interpreted partly as a struggle to offer learners an increasingly inclusive experience of language. Thus while grammar-translation was organised largely around texts of a literary nature, audiolingualism focused on ensuring systematic coverage of the structural repertoire of a language. Despite its thoroughness, a significant part of the reaction against audiolingualism could in turn be seen as a response to the impoverished picture of language that the approach offered. Structures were essentially isolated from typical discourse environments, and contextualised mainly within stimulus-response-feedback sequences. In contrast, subsequent approaches then aimed to embed grammatical structures in potential real life situations (as in the situational approach – see Brown Reference Brown2007a), or incorporate them into interpersonal and discourse functions (notional-functional approaches, Brown Reference Brown2007a) or into the context of real life discourse genres. This evolution can be seen at least in part as a sustained attempt to offer learners a progressively more comprehensive language curriculum, contriving to do justice as fully as possible to our understanding of the nature of language.
Given this – often quite hard-fought – evolution, it is not unreasonable to ask proponents of TBLT how their approach can provide the breadth and depth of coverage of the language curriculum that had been the preoccupation of so many other approaches. And yet much work on TBLT is curiously ahistorical in terms of its relationship to this aspect of the evolution of language teaching pedagogy: it seems to assume that whatever the task, the fact that communication is task-based is sufficient to ensure learners will explore the topography of the target language.
As noted earlier, despite the importance for learners and teachers of this issue, it has not been a concern of much TBLT research to date, reflecting a disconnect between theory and practice. While accepting that predicting the language potential of tasks could lead teachers to use them to ‘focus on forms’ rather than on ‘form’ (Long, Reference Long2015), groups of students and their teachers will still want to know how the tasks on their programmes can help to activate the different domains of language and language skills. Arguing that tasks can be profitably selected to engage learning but without concern for their language potential is surely an untenable position. In other words TBLT has to be accountable in some way or other for its ability to make accessible as much of the length and breadth of the target language as students need and have time to acquire.
3.1.2 Predicting language use in tasks
Exact prediction of language on unscripted tasks is impossible by definition. The question then is how to delineate the relationship between tasks and language in ways that might be useful for teachers. It is one thing to agree that the verbatim language on tasks, the exact sequence of utterances, and the precise choice of formulation cannot be predicted, but it is quite another to claim that the domains of language, at least in terms of lexical fields, grammatical areas, and pragmatic discourse moves and genres, cannot be anticipated (Bygate, Reference Bygate, Ahmadian and Garcia Mayo2018a, Reference Bygate and Bygate2018b offers empirical support for this claim). Some studies illustrate what might be possible here. Samuda (Reference Samuda, Bygate, Skehan and Swain2001) has shown that tasks can be designed which activate students' engagement with the domain of epistemic modality, in discussing the likely significance of an array of objects, even if the students remain free to decide what levels of certainty they wish to commit to, and about precisely which objects. Earlier, Tarone and Parrish (Reference Tarone and Parrish1988) found that discourse type can affect article usage, while Yule and Macdonald (Reference Yule and Macdonald1990) investigated learners' navigation of tasks designed to require them to negotiate reference. Swales (Reference Swales1990) reported studies of how narrative structures typical of case studies were essential to the reading needs of law students, and the nature of simple and complex narrative structures in task performance was explored by Skehan and Foster (Reference Skehan and Foster1997, Reference Skehan and Foster1999), Tavakoli and Foster (Reference Tavakoli and Foster2008) and Foster and Tavakoli (Reference Foster and Tavakoli2009). Bygate and Samuda (Reference Bygate, Samuda and Ellis2005) reported how across repetitions of a task, students used patterns of increasingly elaborated talk involving notably the use of adverbials of place, cause and effect, and purpose. In a more systematic proposal, Robinson (Reference Robinson, van den Branden, Bygate and Norris2009) schematises a range of domains of language under his ‘resource-directing’ dimension, identifying conceptual domains such as ‘here and now’, ‘spatial reasoning’, ‘causal reasoning’, ‘intentional reasoning’, and ‘perspective taking’. Individual studies then have raised the issue of the relationship between tasks and domains of language and identified some patterns without fear of ‘structure-trapping’. Working from studies such as these, a fuller mapping between task design and domains of language would be a significant step forward in making the TBLT project more transparent to teachers.
This should be possible. Numerous linguists (e.g. Gumperz, Reference Gumperz1983; Leech, Reference Leech1983; Halliday, Reference Halliday1995; Croft & Cruse, Reference Croft and Cruse2004) have shown the richness of language as a resource. If TBLT is proposing that tasks can be effectively used to engage with and acquire significant parts of this resource, we should be able to show how the use of tasks can help to achieve this. For instance how representative tasks might engage learners in exploring tense, aspect, mood, and modality. Learners need to be shown getting to grips with comparison, handling reference, understanding and managing a range of conjunctive and adjunctive meanings (additive, adversative, causative, temporal, purposive), and learning the patterning of lexical relations. Studies need to be published of how learners work with tasks that activate their management of different kinds of discourse structures. In other words, we need studies that investigate how tasks of different degrees of difficulty and sophistication can open up different facets of a target language. Unless TBLT can do this more comprehensively, and in a variety of learning contexts, it risks failing to convince key stakeholders of its genuine potential as a full-blown language teaching approach, or of its potential to achieve manageable goals within the limited timescales most learners and teachers have to work to. If teachers and learners needed convincing in the past of the high surrender value of the courses they worked on, this surely still applies today.
3.2 Broadening TBLT in its approach to learning
Despite the merits in studying learning from the range of SLA theories discussed in the first part of this paper, there are grounds for suggesting that as with the focus on language, TBLT has been ignoring the long history of attempts within language teaching methodology to enrich the range of learning processes mobilised within programmes. The pervading assumption that all and only the processes of communication are required for effective language learning has limited the range of human learning processes of interest to TBLT, even in relation to learning processes reported in the broader SLA literature. SLA research (as reported by e.g. Ellis, Reference Ellis1985; McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin1987; Skehan, Reference Skehan1989; DeKeyser, Reference DeKeyser2005; Mitchell, Myles, & Marsden, Reference Mitchell, Myles and Marsden2013; Ellis, Reference Ellis2016) embraces a wide variety of processes involved in the learning of languages, going well beyond those arising within communication. This range is echoed in publications on language teaching methodology (e.g. Reference StevickStevick 1976/1996; Levelt, Reference Levelt1978; Widdowson, Reference Widdowson1978, Reference Widdowson1983; Brumfit, Reference Brumfit1984; Richards & Rodgers, Reference Richards and Rodgers2001; Brown, Reference Brown2007a, Reference Brown2007b; Lightbown & Spada, Reference Lightbown and Spada2013). It is clear that TBLT needs to engage with this.
Even regarding communication-based learning, it is well attested that successful language learning includes processes such as inferencing and category induction, and assimilation of new features to (as well as accommodation of) existing phonological, lexico-grammatical, and pragmatic categories (e.g. Dakin, Reference Dakin1973; Widdowson, Reference Widdowson1983; Celce-Murcia & Goodwin, Reference Celce-Murcia, Goodwin and Celce-Murcia1991; Reference StevickStevick 1976/1996). It is also accepted that associative learning is important in building up knowledge of how lexico-grammatical features behave, particularly within different discourse domains and registers (DeKeyser, Reference DeKeyser2005; Lightbown & Spada, Reference Lightbown and Spada2013). Further, we know (DeKeyser, Reference DeKeyser2005, Reference DeKeyser and Bygate2018) that repeated encounters with sequences of language in similar meaningful contexts enables progressively more successful parsing, interpretation, retention, preparation for future use, and gains in accuracy and fluency. We also know that there are differences in learning styles. For instance, Skehan (Reference Skehan1989) has shown that some learners are significantly more analytically oriented than others, so a robust and comprehensive approach to language pedagogy will need to provide activities that enable both analytical learning and chunk learning (Long, Reference Long2015). Important learning opportunities also arise outside of contexts of communication, which need relating to a TBLT approach. For example, we know that the use of dictionaries and other reference sources can be a powerful way of accessing systemic knowledge that may not be consistently apparent in the context of specific tasks, yet which should not be neglected within TBLT. There is also research which demonstrates the value of transcription (either of oneself or of others) and of self-correction (Lynch, Reference Lynch and Bygate2018).
Although not usually discussed in TBLT circles, memorisation, which often plays an important role in learning – and not just in language learning, but in other domains such as chess, tennis, the training of air pilots, medicine, and the law (DeKeyser, Reference DeKeyser2005, Reference DeKeyser and Bygate2018; Ericsson, Reference Ericsson and Ericsson2009) – should not be neglected. For instance, it can help learners to internalise idiomatic lexico-grammatical sequences which are not easily or logically predictable or recoverable from their first language, from the input or from derived rules; it can provide the material for the learner to rehearse and fine-tune likely output, enabling them to get their head or tongue around the material; it can enable them to build up repertoires of expressions; and in the process it can help provide a basis for fluent production. While it is clearly not sufficient on its own, memorisation is clearly valuable, and can perfectly well be incorporated into task-based activities, for example memorising a joke so as to be able to elicit laughter when telling it, memorising a line to present as an interview candidate, or memorising a series of directions to give someone without need of a cue card (Samuda, personal communication).
To summarise, despite the work of researchers and language teaching specialists (e.g. Willis, Reference Willis1996; van den Branden, Reference van den Branden2006; Willis & Willis, Reference Willis and Willis2007; Eckerth, Reference Eckerth, Eckerth and Siekmann2008; Müller-Hartmann & Schocker-von Ditfurth, Reference Müller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth2011; East, Reference East2012; Erlam, Reference Erlam2015), and publications by teachers (e.g. Edwards & Willis, Reference Edwards and Willis2005) and published teaching materials (e.g. Swan & Walter, Reference Swan and Walter2005), there are good grounds for arguing that TBLT research has failed to connect systematically to the wide variety of learning processes that are known to be involved in language learning. This failure runs the risk of giving educators the impression that TBLT pins its faith on activating a very narrow range of learning processes which would be unlikely to provide a successful basis for a comprehensive approach to language education. A convincing proposal for TBLT as a fully developed approach to language education needs to show how tasks can be used in ways that enable these various processes. That is, TBLT should not only bring something important to the language curriculum, it should also be seen as combining with and enhancing the variety of learning processes and procedures that are already accepted. In other words, TBLT needs to be explored as a resource to be harnessed to other important insights and procedures, and not as an end in itself.
3.3 TBLT as a collaborative applied linguistics
The limitations in TBLT research discussed so far concern matters of content and learning processes. However, applied linguistics can also often have difficulty in addressing problems of real world stakeholders rather than those of the academy. And thus a third major reason why our research may be failing to address real world issues is the lack of engagement with teachers and learners in real world classrooms in which language programmes are ongoing (a problem represented by Swan's ‘invisible practitioner’ (Reference Swan2018, p. 252)). In order to persuade teachers and administrators to participate in TBLT research projects, or adopt TBLT procedures in their classrooms, they need to be convinced of its potential value in action.
3.3.1 Developing a relevant database
This implies we need a rich data-base that enables us to explore and better understand the range of ways in which TBLT can work in different contexts and with different learners, and serve as illustration and guidance in teacher education. A database relevant for stakeholders should include evidence of how tasks can be used through and across lessons as key elements of a lesson or scheme of work, embedded into teaching with other supporting activities. It should also contain evidence of how learners can respond to TBLT at different levels of proficiency. Some studies have appeared in primary (Pinter, Reference Pinter, Edwards and Willis2005, Reference Pinter2007; Shintani, Reference Shintani2016) and tertiary contexts (e.g. Lynch & Maclean, Reference Lynch, Maclean, Bygate, Skehan and Swain2001; Byrnes, Reference Byrnes, Byrnes and Manchón2014, Reference Byrnes and Bygate2015; Kobayashi & Kobayashi, Reference Kobayashi, Kobayashi and Bygate2018; Nitta & Baba, Reference Nitta, Baba and Bygate2018) though many of these have focused more on the functioning of tasks and task types, than on how they can be used to mediate learning. We also need to know (and if they are to adopt TBLT, teachers themselves need to know) how novice and experienced teachers can work with TBLT. We have some studies of this sort (e.g. in Edwards & Willis, Reference Edwards and Willis2005; East, Reference East2012; Erlam, Reference Erlam2015), but few with established teachers who have integrated TBLT into their work, though van den Branden (Reference van den Branden2006), Müller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth (Reference Müller-Hartmann and Schocker-von Ditfurth2011), Müller-Hartmann and Schocker (Reference Müller-Hartmann, Schocker, Samuda, van den Branden and Bygate2018b) and Nguyen, Newton, and Crabbe (Reference Nguyen, Newton, Crabbe, Samuda, van den Branden and Bygate2018) are particular exceptions. Research of this kind would respond to Long's (Reference Long2015, p. 304, footnote) call for the accumulation of substantial databases that can be used to inform and support pre- and in-service teacher development, and provide us with the data that would enable us to adopt a discriminating approach to the selection and use of TBLT procedures. There is likely to be widespread agreement that this would be desirable. Yet the question remains: how to reach a point where TBLT is adopted in a critical mass of programmes? In particular how to persuade teachers and administrators of the value of working with TBLT? Clearly rather than imposing an obligation to adopt TBLT, we need to engage with teachers’ current practices. So how might this unfold in practice?
3.3.2 Facilitating the adoption of TBLT in practice
It is well known that imposing an approach onto professionals from outside is fraught with risks. Research makes clear that adoption of an innovation by third parties (here teachers and administrators) depends primarily on their willingness to try out an innovative procedure, in a way that offers participants and third parties a fair chance of seeing its strengths and weaknesses (Patton, Reference Patton2015). For this, teachers themselves need to have an interest in giving the procedures a chance: implementation of an innovation that the teachers (or indeed the students themselves) do not endorse is almost guaranteed to fail. And, of course, as Patton (Reference Patton2015) makes clear, there will be various reasons why an innovation may not be fully endorsed: for example it may not be properly understood until it has been experienced; teachers will have prior experience of numerous approaches which they are either more comfortable with, or which they know can work. The need for the innovation will often not be apparent to the teacher, and in any case innovative practices will nearly always require more work and are more subject to misfire. As in all walks of life, change is painful, time-consuming, unsettling, and can undermine practitioners' confidence, affecting the teachers' relationships with their students. This leads to the key conclusion that innovation of TBLT practices is likely best grounded in teachers' current practices and understandings, their current concerns and needs and the ways they formulate them. A good starting point then is for the concept and uses of tasks to be introduced in response to their current practices, concerns and needs, including the materials, textbooks, and procedures they already use (Borg & Sanchez, Reference Borg, Sanchez, Borg and Sanchez2015). This in turn implies the need to involve teachers as co-participants in TBLT research.
3.3.3 Involving teachers as co-participants in TBLT research
Involving teachers as co-participants in TBLT research implies that the research questions driving the research will need to answer questions raised by or endorsed by the teachers. Adopting this angle enables the research to be of direct interest to the teacher, providing them with a stake in the project. This also means that the questions can be shaped so that they have face validity for the participant practitioner, in turn shaping the ways in which the research is carried out. A further pay-off of adopting this approach is that the research processes and its outcomes are likely to have more chance of making sense to other practitioners and those on pre- and in-service programmes. Provided the project is manageable, the findings are quite likely to generate a dynamic leading to further projects, since one finding almost inevitably leads to other pedagogically interesting questions. In the process, tasks would be likely to shift from being a tangential element in the teacher's focus to something far more central, and TBLT research would gain immeasurably in its outreach, and in the grounded character of its findings.
An additional implication is that, in the process, TBLT research would become a collaborative enterprise between researchers and teachers (and of course their institutions) – a conception of TBLT research exemplified by Müller-Hartmann and Schocker (Reference Müller-Hartmann, Schocker, Ahmadian and García Mayo2018a, Reference Müller-Hartmann, Schocker, Samuda, van den Branden and Bygate2018b) which focuses on teacher development in the context of ongoing dynamic relationships between teachers and teacher developers. In similar vein, Newton and Bui (Reference Newton, Bui, Ahmadian and García Mayo2018) report a two-phase project in which after an initial observation and feedback phase the development team proposed a revised set of materials which the teachers then taught. Interactive approaches of this kind can help to make TBLT into a genuinely applied linguistic activity, in which it roots TBLT in real world contexts with real world agents, and defines itself in terms shaped and ratified by real world stakeholders. Both the development and the impact of research such as that surrounding a project like TBLT is severely limited unless it is approached as a collaborative project with the relevant real world community. Just as it would be futile to expect research into the language of health care (Sarangi & Candlin, Reference Sarangi and Candlin2003) to be acted on by health care professionals without their collaborative involvement in the research, so TBLT research without the involvement of teachers would confine it to remain within a parallel non-applied academic world. And in any case it is presumptuous to assume that practising teachers have little to offer the development of an approach.
4. Conclusion
As I noted at the beginning, there is no doubt that the use of communicative tasks represents a highly significant development in language teaching – I have even argued (Bygate, Reference Bygate2003) that it amounts to a revolution. Yet the ambition of TBLT goes well beyond merely advocating the use of tasks for language teaching: it aspires to developing a comprehensive researched approach to language teaching, in which tasks are the foundation of the whole curriculum, as well as providing the structural underpinning to lessons and schemes of work. It seems clear (to me at least) that this ambition can, in principle, be achieved. TBLT can be a comprehensive approach in the sense that tasks embrace all the levels of language identified by successive teaching approaches, and are compatible with all known learning processes. Its potential is reflected in the fact that over 35 years after the earliest publications, it remains a topic of lively interest and debate.
However, just as with any approach to the development of language pedagogy (cf. Borg & Sanchez, Reference Borg, Sanchez, Borg and Sanchez2015), and indeed any applied linguistic project, for the theory to translate into practice, research needs to bridge the gap between the research community and the real world of the language teacher and the language programme by making its full potential visible. First, as I have been arguing, we need to demonstrate how tasks can be designed and used as a portal enabling learners to engage with the entire language curriculum (a major concern of mine since 1987/1988); next, to show how tasks can be deployed in ways that mobilise the full range of processes known to be used profitably in language learning; and, finally, we really should demonstrate empirically how this can be done by working with practising teachers to address their own concerns within the context of ongoing programmes. In other words, and to echo the arguments of Tarone (Reference Tarone2013) and Widdowson (Reference Widdowson2017), TBLT needs substantial and extensive engagement with the issues and realities of real world stakeholders if it is to move out of the world of research and become part of a genuinely applied linguistics. Otherwise, TBLT researchers will remain in their bubble, the teaching and learning parts of the acronym will go by default, and the gap between theory and real world practice will continue to plague us even as TBLT gives way to the next Big Thing.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Graeme Porte and Language Teaching for the opportunity to submit this paper, and especially to Gin Samuda for her unfailing encouragement and good-humoured critical feedback. Any remaining weaknesses can be easily traced back to me.
Martin Bygate is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at Lancaster University. His main interests have been the teaching of speaking and the use of tasks, focusing especially on the language that learners use on tasks, whether learners' repeated encounters with tasks can help both learning and teaching, and the strengths and weaknesses of different procedures. These interests grew out of his experiences teaching language in primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions, as well as in UK language schools, and were lastingly shaped by his time working with colleagues on the Reading MATEFL, a programme which deliberately balanced and blended modules of theoretical exploration and practical application. He co-edited (with Alan Tonkyn and Eddie Williams) Grammar and the language teacher (Prentice Hall, 1994), published with Virginia Samuda Tasks in language learning (Palgrave, 2008), and edited Domains and directions in TBLT (John Benjamins, 2015) and Task repetition in language learning (John Benjamins, 2018), also publishing articles on task performance and repetition, the teaching of spoken language, and the nature of applied linguistics. He was co-editor of Applied Linguistics, President of AILA, and for many years co-edited a book series on TBLT (John Benjamins).
