First and foremost, readers should know that this book is not about how to design language teaching tasks. Rather, it is a pilot study of how professional task designers and teachers prepare language tasks for the classroom.

Johnson begins his book with a rationale for studying task design from the perspective of research on expertise. The author is keenly interested in what sets apart an “expert” task designer from a “nonexpert.” Thus, the first chapter is devoted to the aforementioned rationale, as well as defining “task” and providing background for the research project.

Chapter 2 reviews the literature on studies of expertise. Because very little has been written on expertise in the field of applied linguistics, the majority of studies reviewed here have to do with the general notion of expertise and how it may possibly relate to the preparation of language teaching tasks. Research reviewed here includes such areas as chess playing and mathematical problem solving. This is a fascinating area of study and will most likely be new territory for most linguists and language teachers.

Chapter 3 deals with the research methodology employed in Johnson's own study. The task to be used in the study is presented here—an oral activity involving the description of people. One also finds an extensive review of the literature on research methodology that is used to justify the use of concurrent verbalization in Johnson's study. Extensive treatment of data coding is also included in this chapter, leading to the development of TADECS, or Task Design Coding System, the coding system used to analyze the data generated in the study.

Chapter 4 presents data from two subjects—one categorized as expert (labeled specialist or S for this study) and one categorized as nonexpert (labeled nonspecialist/teacher or NS/T). This chapter serves to introduce the reader to the TADECS coding system and to foreshadow some of the more important differences in the manner in which S and NS/T designers go about creating a language task.

Chapters 5 and 6 explore what happens as the subjects design tasks based on the design brief they are provided with. Chapter 5 deals with the early stages of design as subjects read the brief and prepare to design a task that meets the design brief's criteria. Chapter 6 treats the middle and end stages of task design. Ample space is devoted to direct quotes from the subjects' verbalizations during the task design. Each section in these two chapters concludes with a shaded box that includes the author's hypotheses regarding which behaviors seem to lead to good task design. These boxes will be a boon to those short of time or wishing to get directly to the results.

Chapter 7 sums up the hypotheses reached in the two previous chapters. That is, what do good task designers do when they design tasks? For example, Johnson hypothesizes that good task designers are able to visualize possible activities with concrete details, easily abandon dead-end designs, and use their extensive repertoires to create new tasks.

The final chapter describes how the tasks created by the subjects in the study were evaluated. This was an attempt to determine if the so-called experts consistently produced tasks of higher perceived quality than the so-called nonexperts.

Presumably due to the lack of previous research in this area of applied linguistics and also due to the sheer volume of qualitative data generated by this study, Johnson has chosen to present the results in book-length form rather than as a more typical, article-length paper. Several chapters provide more detailed information than strictly necessary along with redundant information that can make for rather tedious reading. For practitioners looking for ideas on designing tasks for the ESL or foreign language classroom, this book will be of limited interest. Other books, such as Lee (2000) and Nunan (1996), provide much more practical approaches to task design. On the other hand, this volume provides an intriguing look into the process of task design from the minds (and mouths) of the designers themselves and gives direction to future research into expertise studies in the field of foreign language task design.