(International Journal of Applied Linguistics 15/2, 2005). Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishing. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com)
Rod Ellis
Task-based Language Learning and Teaching
OUP 2003
ISBN: 0 19 442159 7
x + 387 pages
Ellis’s book offers a clear, detailed and comprehensive survey of the theory underpinning task-based language teaching (TBLT), the relevant research, and the associated pedagogic principles. The first of its ten chapters, ‘Tasks in SLA and Language Pedagogy’, provides introductory definitions and distinctions. The next five examine theoretical and pedagogic aspects of TBLT, dealing in turn with ‘Tasks, Listening Comprehension and SLA’, ‘Tasks, Interaction and SLA’, ‘Tasks, Production and Language Acquisition’, ‘Focused Tasks and SLA’ and ‘Sociocultural SLA’. The last four chapters focus directly on pedagogy: ‘Designing Task-Based Language Courses’, ‘The Methodology of Task-Based Language Teaching’, ‘Task-Based Assessment’ and ‘Evaluating Task-Based Pedagogy’. Ellis stresses, however, that this is not a ‘how to’ manual: his purpose is not to tell people what or how to teach, but to clarify the principles which can inform decision-making in TBLT.
A task, for the purposes of Ellis’s study, is:
‘a workplan that requires learners to process language pragmatically in order to achieve an outcome that can be evaluated in terms of whether the correct or appropriate propositional content has been conveyed. To this end, it requires them to give primary attention to meaning and to make use of their own linguistic resources, although the design of the task may predispose them to choose particular forms. A task is intended to result in language use that bears a resemblance, direct or indirect, to the way language is used in the real world. Like other language activities, a task can engage productive or receptive, and oral or written skills, and also various cognitive processes’ (p. 16).
Task-based language teaching (TBLT), the approach which Ellis describes and advocates, involves designing whole courses around tasks, and is related to a strong version of CLT. Ellis distinguishes TBLT from ‘task-supported language teaching’, which simply combines task use with traditional pedagogy, and is consistent with a weak version of CLT. Tasks can be ‘unfocused’, involving unspecified language use, or ‘focused’, encouraging the processing of specific linguistic features. Unlike ‘exercises’, which are ‘primarily concerned with practising a specific form’, focused tasks require that learners are ‘not informed of the specific linguistic focus’, and are therefore free to concentrate on meaning and to choose their own resources; any attention to form will be incidental (p. 141). This is a central issue, since the strong CLT position underpinning TBLT holds that acquisition is mediated by genuine communication; if attention is on form rather than meaning, acquisitional processes are not engaged. Ellis frequently returns to this point, expressing concern that this or that task-type may encourage attention to form rather than meaning, and thus transmute undesirably into an exercise. (The TBLT language acquisition device has an engagingly adolescent character: it will learn happily unless it detects that you are seriously trying to teach it something, in which case it switches off.) However, some of the ‘focused tasks’ which Ellis instances are quite clearly ‘exercises’ by his definition – for example the ‘consciousness-raising’ activity (pp. 324–5) requiring students to underline the subjects of sentences and supply correct verb forms.
By getting learners to produce samples of language, a task, for Ellis, serves both as a ‘research instrument for investigating SLA’ and as a ‘vehicle for organizing teaching communicatively’. A strength of the book is its consistent concern with this dual perspective: Ellis alternates between explaining what theory and research have to tell us about the kinds of language use generated by tasks, and showing how such language use can be exploited in ways that are hypothesized to contribute to acquisition. ‘Hypothesized’ is important: as Ellis makes clear, few types of task use have been shown empirically to result in acquisition.
Input-based, interaction-based and output-based theories and their pedagogic correlates are covered in detail, and Ellis is careful to discuss their weaknesses as well as their strengths. The application to TBLT of sociocultural theory, which Ellis sees as being somewhat at odds with other approaches, has a chapter of its own. Despite the clarity of Ellis’s writing, and the importance of the discussion of scaffolding, collaborative dialogue etc, I found this chapter heavy going conceptually and terminologically. I ran into difficulty early on with the statement attributed to Swain that ‘language learning … involves learning how to use language to mediate language learning’ (p. 176). And I had some trouble with Ellis’s story (p. 181) of a beginner who, shown a picture of a bicycle with no pedals, answered the teacher’s question ‘What’s wrong’ by saying ‘red’. It seems that his failure to reply correctly was due to his inability to ‘construct a Zone of Proximal Development to enable him to perform this function’. One can think of simpler explanations.
Ellis’s rationale for task-based language courses (Chapter 7) rehearses the familiar arguments for believing TBLT superior to traditional approaches based on ‘linguistic’ syllabuses. Traditional approaches have ‘failed’; they are ‘interventionist’ and ‘external to the learner’; they attempt unreasonably to ‘elicit immediate target-like mastery of forms’; a preplanned syllabus cannot take account of the learner’s inbuilt developmental syllabus; traditional approaches are ‘incompatible with what is known about L2 acquisition’; and so on. While broadly espousing these views, Ellis accepts that the criticisms are open to challenge, and that there is actually no research evidence for the superiority of task-based approaches.
A central concern of TBLT is the need for tasks to include implicit or explicit ‘focus on form’, contrived so as not to distract attention from the communicative activity believed to be crucial for acquisition. In order to promote target-like accuracy, some systematic teaching of difficult points during pre- and post-task work is also widely seen as desirable. This is a problematic issue for TBLT, with its central doctrine that acquisition is only possible ‘on-line’ during communication. (Ellis is careful to do justice to skill-building theories, which do generally license the view that explicit off-line teaching can lead to acquisition through a progression from explicit/declarative to implicit/procedural knowledge via automatisation and the restructuring of linguistic representations. However, he makes it clear that he does not accept such models.) Ellis adopts a ‘weak interface’ position (or ‘weak non-interface’ – he confusingly uses both terms), according to which explicit knowledge does not contribute directly to acquisition, but facilitates noticing (in input) and noticing-the-gap (in output), and so aids implicit on-line learning. He also puts forward, in Chapter 7, his own proposal for a two-strand syllabus consisting of a ‘communicative module’ and a ‘code-based module’. The communicative module has unfocused tasks designed to promote accuracy, fluency and complexity of language use while incorporating incidental focus on form. The code-based module, introduced at intermediate level, addresses linguistic points observed to need remedial attention, and can, Ellis says, be taught through PPP or focused tasks. No attempt is made to integrate the two strands.
Ellis’s intermediate-and-above modular approach seems surprisingly similar to the ‘task-supported’ teaching which has traditionally been practised at these levels, and which he dismisses earlier in the book. In both, problematic linguistic features are taught explicitly (not necessarily through tasks), and language use is practised separately through communicative activities which may or may not be designed so as to favour use of the linguistic features in question. Ellis’s proposal does however diverge sharply from traditional practice as regards low-level teaching. He rejects the explicit teaching of structures to beginners, on the grounds that ‘early L2 learning is lexical in nature and largely looks after itself as long as learners have access to input and opportunities to use the L2. At this stage errors abound in learner language and there is little point in trying to address them as many of them will be eliminated fairly rapidly in natural ways.’(p. 237) The notion that, because beginners naturally go through an agrammatical phase, they should be left to work their way through it without help, is an interesting one. It is unlikely, however, to commend itself to many experienced teachers, and the logic is far from persuasive. (If I am dropped at night by parachute into the middle of a remote moorland area, I am likely to go through a lost phase; this is not however a compelling reason for refusing to supply me with a map, compass and flashlight.)
The main problem with the book, and it is a serious one, arises from the topic rather than from Ellis’s account of it. Quite simply, ‘TBLT’ is not primarily a language-teaching approach. Language teaching means teaching language, not just practising ‘holistically’ and ‘non-interventionally’ language which has already been taught. TBLT, however, is mainly concerned with improving learners’ command of what they know – what we used to call, over-simply, ‘fluency practice’. Writers on TBLT refer regularly, as Ellis does, to the need for learners ‘to make use of their own linguistic resources’. The question of where these resources come from is largely side-stepped. Ellis has some references to task-related lexical acquisition, but the book does not treat vocabulary teaching as an issue that requires any systematic attention. Discussion of the development of ‘accuracy’ through focus on form or explicit teaching focuses on ‘restructuring’ existing interlanguage; the establishment of interlanguage grammar is given remarkably little space. There is no discussion of pronunciation teaching, an essential priority for many learners. Ellis identifies problems that learners may have with both top-down and bottom-up processing of aural input, but he has nothing whatever to say about how these might be remedied, despite the fact that simple difficulty in decoding the stream of speech is probably the prime reason for L2 aural comprehension problems. And although Ellis’s definition of tasks refers to receptive or productive, oral or written skills, the book says nothing at all about the teaching of writing or reading.
These are not defects in Ellis’s coverage: they are design features of TBLT. The approach involves an unexamined act of faith that new language, if needed, will be picked up in ill-defined ways in the process of doing communicative tasks. The idea that such material might need to be separately selected, presented and practised is explicitly rejected. Concern with ‘product’ is dismissed as typical of old-style PPP. Ellis considers the blurring of the distinction between syllabus and methodology an ‘attractive feature’ of TBLT, and cites as a central tenet of the approach the idea that ‘no attempt is made to specify what learners will learn, only how they will learn’. Indeed, students are better regarded primarily as ‘users’, not learners, we are told; ‘any learning that takes place [during a task] is incidental’ (p. 3). This is really very odd; it is hard to think of other educational fields where a virtue is made of discouraging learners from acting like learners, refusing to specify what they are supposed to learn, and regarding learning as incidental.
One might reasonably enquire whether TBLT is equally appropriate for dealing with all aspects of language (lexis? grammar? phonology? skills?); for the whole range of language types (this book is effectively about TBELT); and for all learning contexts. Such questions are unfortunately not raised in Ellis’s account of what is essentially a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. It seems likely, in fact, that TBLT is principally valuable for two kinds of student: those who have already been taught more language than they can use, and those who have substantial out-of-class exposure. For lower-level secondary-school students who have perhaps three hours a week of language study in countries where the target language is not spoken (that is to say, probably the majority of the world’s language learners), the value of the approach is substantially less clear. In his final chapter, Ellis expresses surprise that TBLT is not more widely adopted, suggesting several possible reasons, such as teachers’ problems with innovation. He does not, however, consider the most compelling grounds for many teachers’ rejection of TBLT: that, in the contexts in which they work, they may simply not consider it a viable approach.
TBLT’s claim to be such an approach, and its dismissal of traditional teaching, is based entirely on hypothesis. The inverted pyramid of TBLT theory is balanced on a single point, theoretically and empirically ill supported: the belief that the acquisition of all aspects of language necessarily takes place on-line during communicative activity. In this regard, Ellis is too good a researcher not to seek objectivity, but he is too committed an advocate to maintain it consistently. He often talks about the kinds of interaction ‘hypothesized’ to be important for acquisition, and about the lack of empirical evidence. But these caveats frequently disappear, leaving confident references like the ones on page 336 to ‘the cognitive processes through which acquisition takes place’.
Ellis is a distinguished scholar, whose ability to survey a complex area of enquiry and provide an accessible account of it has benefited generations of students, teachers and teacher trainers. While Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching shows these qualities in full measure, the book is in my opinion a good deal better than its subject matter. It will certainly be valuable to scholars and others who want a comprehensive and detailed account of the relevant theory and research. Whether it will be useful to the teaching profession in general, given the limitations of TBLT, is another matter.