566087

research-article2015
LTR0010.1177/1362168814566087Language Teaching ResearchErlam

LANGUAGE
TEACHING
Article RESEARCH

Language Teaching Research

‘I’m still not sure what a

1­–21
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1362168814566087
language tasks ltr.sagepub.com

Rosemary Erlam
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract
Ellis (2003) identifies four key criteria that distinguish a ‘task’ from the types of situational grammar
exercises that are typically found in the more traditional language classroom. This study investigates
how well teachers were able to design tasks that fulfilled these four criteria (Ellis, 2003) at the
end of a year-long professional development programme in which TBLT figured prominently.
Forty-three tasks designed by the teachers for use in their own foreign language classrooms
are analysed against Ellis’s four criteria in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the professional
development programme, on the premise that adequate understanding of the construct of task
underpins successful implementation of TBLT. The findings show that some aspects of task-design
were difficult for teachers. Implications for professional development programmes that focus on
TBLT, such as the one whose effectiveness is evaluated here, are discussed.

Keywords
foreign language learning, language task, professional development, TBLT, teacher education

I Introduction
Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is viewed as a development within the
Communicative Language Teaching movement (Littlewood, 2014), having been
described as the ‘strong version’ of this approach (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011).
It is motivated by theories of learning, drawing on the idea that learners best learn
when they are actively involved in constructing their own knowledge through experience
and problem solving (Dewey, 1913, as cited in Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011). It
proposes that students will acquire language through the process of completing tasks
that require meaningful communication.

Corresponding author:
Rosemary Erlam, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand
Email: r.erlam@auckland.ac.nz

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2 Language Teaching Research 

For the past 20 years TBLT has attracted much attention, gaining, according to Andon
and Eckerth (2009), the status of a ‘new orthodoxy’. It has become the dominant approach
to teaching in many contexts and is officially endorsed in some countries (e.g. Carless,
2004; Van den Branden, 2006).
Ellis (2009) outlines a number of principles, which he suggests will facilitate the
successful implementation of TBLT in a given educational context. One of these is that
teachers need to have a clear understanding of what a language task is. Andon and
Eckerth (2009) also point to a relationship between the successful implementation of
TBLT and teachers’ understanding of the concepts of a task and task-based teaching.

II Background
1 The task as construct
In TBLT the primary unit for designing a language programme and for planning individual
lessons is the ‘task’ (Ellis, 2009). However, there has been a lack of consistency in the
way that the language task has been defined (Ellis, 2003). Definitions drawn from both
research and pedagogic literature include those by Breen (1989), Skehan (1996),
Bygate, Skehan and Swain (2001) and others, all of which differ in scope. Van den
Branden (2006) points out that, despite differences, the various definitions nevertheless
share a common understanding, that is, that people not only learn language in order to
make functional use of it, but also that they learn by making functional use of it. He
goes on to stress that, in understanding the construct of task, the primacy of meaning
and of the learner functioning as user, and not just learner, are key. He further points
out that some definitions identify the importance of the learner drawing on his or her
own linguistic and cognitive resources in task completion.
Ellis (2012) proposes a set of definitional criteria against which a given activity may
be judged as more or less task-like. These are first introduced in Ellis (2003, p. 35) as a
way of ‘assessing with some rigour to what extent an activity is a task’. Ellis claims that
these criteria draw on definitions provided by Bygate et al. (2001), Samuda & Bygate
(2008) and Willis (1996). He further elaborates on and explains these four key criteria,
which are presented below, in Ellis and Shintani (2013, p. 135).

1. The primary focus should be on ‘meaning’ (i.e. learners should be mainly concerned
with encoding and decoding messages, not with focusing on linguistic form).
2. There should be some kind of ‘gap’ (i.e. a need to convey information, to express
an opinion or to infer meaning).
3. Learners should largely rely on their own resources (linguistic and non-linguistic)
in order to complete the activity. That is, learners are not ‘taught’ the language
they will need to perform the task, although they may be able to ‘borrow’ from
the input the task provides to help them perform it.
4. There is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language (i.e. the lan-
guage serves as the means for achieving the outcome, not as an end in its own
right). Thus, when performing a task, learners are not primarily concerned with
using language correctly but rather with achieving the goal stipulated by the task’.

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Erlam 3

Ellis (2003) demonstrates, using examples, how these four criteria can be applied to
discriminate tasks from ‘situational grammar exercises’. He explains that contrary to
Widdowson’s (2003) claim that the definition of a task is problematic, that it is rather the
application of the definitional criteria that is problematic (Ellis, 2012).
However, even with consensual agreement about what the key components of a
language task might be, Nunan (1989, p. 11) contends that it is not always easy to
distinguish a task from an exercise and that ‘making decisions will always be partly
intuitive and judgemental’. Ellis (2003) is not insensitive to this problem, agreeing
that differentiating tasks and situational grammar exercises may be problematic as some
activities have features of both. In Ellis (2009) he makes the point that criteria two
and three of the four criteria outlined in Ellis (2003) may be satisfied by a situational
grammar exercise but that criteria 1 and 4 are unlikely to be, these being the key criteria
for an activity to be task-like.
Littlewood (2004) argues for thinking in terms of dimensions rather than aiming for a
consensus in terms of a definition of a task. He proposes a continuum, at one end of
which a situational grammar exercise would encourage a learner to focus on forms, and,
at the other end, would encourage a focus on meaning. He places a ‘task’ midway (at the
level of communicative language practice which allows for the practice of pre-taught
language in a context where it communicates new information) and extending to the right
of the continuum. At the right hand (focus on meaning) end of this continuum authentic
communication would involve using language in situations where meanings are unpre-
dictable. A second continuum determines the level of the learner’s active personal
involvement with the task. The fact that thinking of the distinction between a task and a
situational grammar exercise as one that is ‘continuous’, rather than ‘dichotomous’, is
viable and helpful is also acknowledged in Ellis and Shintani (2013).

2 The task as workplan

The task as construct becomes the task as workplan in the hands of the teacher as he/she
crafts a lesson for the language classroom. At this stage the task as workplan is viewed
from the perspective of the designer; it is the student, who will experience the task as
process (Ellis, 2003). Ellis (2003) asks whether it is the task as workplan or the task as
process that should be examined to decide whether an activity is a ‘task’. The definitions
previously discussed adopt a task-designer’s perspective and it is the intention of the
designer that is the focus in this study. However, it is important to recognize that the gap
between the task as workplan and the task as process can be wide and that the predictions
made by the designer and the anticipated use of language may not always result (Breen,
1987; Ellis, 2003). However, while the relationship between the task as workplan and the
task as process may not be perfect, it does, nevertheless, exist (Ellis, 2009).

3 Criticism of TBLT
A new approach to language teaching is seldom without its critics and TBLT is no exception.
Seedhouse (2005), for example, argues that a task is not a valid construct on which to base
a language teaching programme. Sheen (1994) claims that the TBLT approach is relevant

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4 Language Teaching Research 

only to the second language classroom, because, in foreign language learning, there is no
opportunity for students to communicate outside of the classroom, and therefore no
rationale to work at tasks that would be applicable to a wider context. Swan (2005) main-
tains that TBLT is unsuitable for beginner learners because unless they have a foundation
in grammar they will not be able to communicate. Ellis (2009), however, counters these
arguments by saying that it is wrong to assume that TBLT requires only production and
points out the difference between input-providing tasks and output-prompting tasks. He
refers to Prabhu’s (1987) examples of tasks that require beginner learners to work only
with language input and maintains that an input-based approach will enable students to
build the grammatical resources they need for language production. He also claims that
TBLT is well suited to an acquisition-poor or foreign language learning context in that
it gives students, inside the classroom, the opportunities to communicate that they lack
outside of the classroom.

4 Educating teachers about TBLT

There has been widespread acknowledgement in the literature that teachers tend to
embark on teacher professional development/education programmes with pre-formed
ideas about what constitutes best practice and that these ideas tend to act as a filter to new
information, with the result that beliefs and consequently practice may not be changed
(Kagan, 1992; Velez-Rendon, 2006). There is an emerging body of literature documenting
the results of initiatives that attempt to equip teachers so that they can adapt their classroom
practice to TBLT.
Ellis and Shintani (2013) note that key difficulties that teachers may experience with
introducing TBLT into their classrooms may relate to problems firstly, in understanding
what a task and/or a task-based approach to language teaching really is and, second, to
problems in implementing a task-based approach in a particular context.
There is considerable evidence that teachers have problems understanding what a
task-based approach to language learning really means (Littlewood, 2004). Carless
(2004) found that teachers in primary school classrooms in Hong Kong reconciled
task-based approaches with their own understanding of tasks. Clark, Lo, Hui, Kam,
Carless and Wong (1999) also found that teachers had difficulty interpreting and
implementing tasks in a Hong Kong primary school context. Chan (2012) documents
teachers, also in Hong Kong, having difficulty in understanding TBLT as introduced
through an in-service professional development programme. More recently, Hu (2013),
through a series of interviews and classroom observations, found that Chinese teachers
of English in Beijing understood the notion of tasks differently. Zheng and Borg (2014),
with the aim of using their findings to inform the provision of teacher education, also
examined what happened in the classroom when Chinese teachers of English tried
to implement a task-based curriculum. They found that TBLT was interpreted rather
narrowly, and misunderstood as providing students with opportunities to speak English
in pairs or groups.
There are, however, successful examples of task-based education initiatives.
McDonough and Chaikitmongkol (2007) report evidence that teachers clearly under-
stood what constituted a task following a task-based course for students at Chang

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Erlam 5

Mai University in Thailand. Linsen (1994, as cited in Van den Branden, 2009) and
Van den Branden (2006) both document that the implementation of TBLT in Flemish
education has been a success, particularly in the primary school context. Van den
Branden does caution, however, that TBLT can take a number of years to be fully
integrated into school practice.
Ellis (2003) recognizes that language teachers have been slow to recognize the
value of tasks and suggests that an alternative to presenting teachers with the notion that
they should design whole courses around tasks, is to encourage them to incorporate
tasks along with more traditional approaches to teaching. He suggests that this is a
task-supported rather than a task-based approach to language teaching. In a task-
supported approach there is an emphasis on the use of tasks to help students develop
language fluency rather than on the use of tasks as a means by which learners acquire
new language or restructure their interlanguages. Arguably, a task-supported approach
is more client-centred (Widdowson, 1993) in that it does not impose recommendations
on teachers but leaves them with the agency to try out and respond to new ideas in
their own teaching contexts. Erlam (2008) partially attributes the success of a Ministry
of Education funded professional development initiative to the fact that it adopted a
client-centred approach. The practitioners involved were encouraged to reflect on
how the information they had been given could be relevant for them, rather than being
told to adopt new practices.

III The study

1 Rationale for the present study
The introduction of TBLT has tended to be top-down and much TBLT-oriented research
has been conducted in either laboratory or controlled settings. Carless claims that TBLT
is under-researched in state school settings (Carless, 2004) and, more particularly, with
younger learners (Carless, 2012). Another context that has been overlooked in research
on TBLT is its application to the teaching of modern languages other than English.
Research has primarily been focused on the teaching of English in foreign or second
language contexts (Klapper, 2003).
The present study was conducted in the New Zealand state school context where there
has been considerable attention to and promotion of TBLT (East, 2012) following the
introduction of a new school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). It aimed to
investigate how language teachers, teaching modern languages other than English to
young language learners, understand and interpret a language task after completion of an
in-service professional development programme. The main rationale for the study was
an evaluation of the success of the programme in helping teachers to develop a clear
understanding of a task, on the premise that this would be a necessary prerequisite for
them to be able to successfully implement TBLT in their teaching contexts. The study,
therefore, investigated the ‘task as workplan’, looking at how the tasks that the teachers
designed fulfilled the four criteria proposed by Ellis (2003). It was anticipated that results
of the study might suggest where changes could be made to the programme in order to
address any gaps in teachers’ understanding. The study had been initially motivated by

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6 Language Teaching Research 

the teacher who commented at the end of the year-long programme ‘I’m still not sure
what a task is’.

2 Research questions
The questions that the study asked are as follows:

1. How successful are language teachers in designing, for their own foreign
language classrooms, language tasks that satisfy the four criteria proposed by
Ellis (2003)?
2. In designing language tasks for the classroom, which of the four Ellis (2003)
criteria do teachers find most difficult to satisfy?
3. In designing language tasks for the classroom, which of the four Ellis (2003)
criteria do teachers find easiest to satisfy?

IV Method
1 Participants
The participants in this study were all qualified and experienced teachers in New
Zealand schools¹ and were enrolled in TPDL (Teacher Professional Development
Languages), a year-long Ministry of Education funded professional development
programme aimed to equip teachers to teach a foreign language effectively in their
classroom/school. The programme is primarily aimed to cater for teachers of students in
Years 7 to 10 (i.e. students approximately 11 to 14 years of age) but under-subscription
from this target group allows for the participation of teachers outside of this age range
(for a breakdown of the teachers in this study, see Table 1). The programme addresses
the needs of both non-specialist teachers teaching an additional language for the first
time and those of experienced language teachers. The languages that the programme
caters for are: French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Samoan, Tongan, Cook Is
Maori, Tokelauan, Nuiean (see Table 1). For the majority of students in New Zealand
learning the non-Pasifika languages in this list, the language learning context would be
one that is ‘acquisition-poor’, that is, there would be no, or very little, exposure to the
target language outside of the classroom. As discussed previously, TBLT is perhaps
particularly well suited to such contexts because it provides opportunities for learners to
communicate inside the classroom, when they do not have these outside the classroom
(Ellis, 2009).
The Pasifika languages have the status of community languages in New Zealand and
students in these language classrooms may be learning the language as a second or heritage
language. While the year levels in Table 1 give information about the age range of
students that the participants in the study were teaching languages to, they do not give
any information about the level of language learning of these students. This information
can only be approximated because it is based on the length of time that students have
been learning the language. Thirty teachers (70% of the present data set) were teaching

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Erlam 7

a language to students who were receiving instruction in their first year of learning the
language (referred to as beginner learners in this study). Twelve teachers (28%) were
teaching a language to students in their second year of study of the language² (referred to
as elementary learners). Exposure to the language varied enormously between school
contexts. Some teachers taught their students for one lesson only a week (some lessons
were as short as 45 minutes), others several lessons a week, whereas other teachers
reported that, because they were responsible for teaching all curriculum areas to their
class, they could use the target language during other lessons. It is obvious, however, that
for the vast majority of cases, the students were at beginner or elementary level in terms
of their language learning.
Table 1. Breakdown of class year level.

Class year Number of teachers

8 12
10 10
9 8
7 4
6, 5 2 at each level
Adult, 12, 4, 2, 1 1 at each level
Total 43

Table 2. Languages taught.

Language Number of teachers

French 12
Japanese 11
Spanish 9
Mandarin 7
German 2
Samoan, Tongan 1 each
Total 43

2 TPDL programme content

The TPDL programme has been running since 2005 and comprises three main compo-
nents; for more information see Insley and Thomson (2008). Teachers are, first, strongly
encouraged to improve their language proficiency by pursuing language study targeted
at their level of proficiency in the target language that they are teaching. The ‘in-school
support’ component of the programme provides for teachers to be visited and observed
four times during the year as they teach a language lesson. It aims to assist teachers apply

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8 Language Teaching Research 

theory and practice presented in the ‘second language acquisition’ (SLA) pedagogy
component and it evaluates teachers’ teaching practice against key standards. The SLA
component is a Stage 3 University course (i.e. a course which would normally be taken
in the third year of a University programme) which is delivered over four two-day blocks.
The researcher has taught on the pedagogy component of the programme since 2011.
The theoretical framework that underpins the programme is Ellis’s (2005) 10 Principles
of Effective Instructed Language Acquisition. In the ‘in-school support’ component of the
programme teachers’ classroom practice is evaluated for evidence of these 10 principles
(regrettably there is not room for further discussion of these in this paper). TBLT is seen
as a methodology that allows for the successful implementation of Ellis’s principles in the
classroom. There is, therefore, a strong focus on TBLT in the programme, although teachers
are introduced to the notion of a task-supported methodology in the recognition that there
are other methodologies and that they, as practitioners are best able to decide to what
extent they will incorporate tasks in their ongoing classroom practice.
Teachers are primarily introduced to TBLT during the pedagogy component of the
course. They are told that there are a number of ways of describing/defining tasks and
are, at different times, exposed to Skehan’s (1996) and Willis’s (1996) definitions.
However, it is Ellis’s criteria that are given prominence in the course, as these are the
criteria that are presented in the section of their course handbook that explains TBLT and
the criteria against which all tasks that they work with in class are evaluated. Teachers
are given a number of lectures on the topic of TBLT (e.g. Introduction to TBLT, Types of
tasks, Designing tasks, Planning lessons and units of work using a task-supported
approach). They are also repeatedly exposed to language tasks throughout the pro-
gramme, in the recognition that transmitting only the theory of TBLT would be extremely
limiting (Van den Branden, 2009). For example, at their ‘Introduction meeting’ teachers
are given a task to complete that will help them get to know other participants (each
participant is given a different question to answer as they interact amongst themselves,
e.g. who has been to the most exotic place?; who has a relative with the most unusual
name?). While this is not a ‘language -learning’ task in that participants complete it in
English, the fact that it fulfils Ellis’s four key criteria (2003) is highlighted upon completion.
Throughout the pedagogy course teachers complete a range of tasks and discuss and
evaluate them together. A number of these they complete in their ‘language groups’ (i.e.
using the language that they are learning/teaching to complete the task). For example,
they play an Animal board game together or complete a task called ‘what’s in the teacher’s
handbag?’ where they have to agree on and draw up a list of the 10 items that they think
are in the handbag on the table in front of them. They also complete at least one ‘memory
card game’ task requiring them to read Te reo Maori (a language which all but a small
minority would have familiarity with at the word level only) and designed to demon-
strate how an input-based task can be designed to encourage learners to notice language
form. Following completion of each one of these tasks, the lecturer draws attention to
Ellis’s criteria (2003), asking participants’ opinions as to whether or not, and how, the
task fulfils the four criteria. Finally, the main assessment component of the course (worth
50%) requires teachers to plan, teach and evaluate a task-based lesson, collecting
evidence of its effectiveness. They are told that the aim of this assignment is to help give

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Erlam 9

them the skills that they would need to implement a task-supported methodology and
also to give them the experience of conducting a principled investigation into the effec-
tiveness of their teaching. This ‘Learning Inquiry’ is presented to the rest of the group
and handed in as a written assignment for grading purposes. These assignments form the
data set for the current study. A total of 43 teachers agreed to make their written Learning
Inquiry assignments available.

3 Data sources/type
The focus of this research was on the language task as a workplan, so the researcher
focused on teachers’ written descriptions of their tasks (including pre-task, task and post
task) as they intended to teach them in the language classroom rather than on what was
actually achieved. If, for example, students did not achieve the task outcome, but the
teacher had planned for an outcome that fulfilled the criteria of a task, they were credited
for this. On some occasions, however, because in the assignment teachers had to evaluate
their tasks, teachers’ comments were useful in giving some additional indication either
about what their task was really like and/or what they had intended. For example, the
admission by one teacher that his task was weak because it was obvious that his students
were not functioning as language users (it being understood that it had not been designed
to enable this) served to confirm the researcher’s rating conclusion.
One category, however, for which the researcher did depend more particularly on a
description of what the teacher did and/or of what happened in the classroom, was
criteria three, the requirement that students rely on their own linguistic resources. Here
it was necessary to know exactly what language support the students had during the
completion of the task, information that teachers did not always adequately cover in
their task workplan description.

4 Data analysis/coding
The Learning Inquiry tasks were coded against the four criteria presented above under
‘The task as construct’ (Ellis, 2012; Ellis & Shintani, 2013). The questions that the
coder asked in each case and the answers that were expected for the task to meet these
criteria are in Table 3. In each case both questions had to be answered correctly in
order for the criteria to be coded as respected. Because most of the teachers in this
study were teaching learners who had had no or very limited exposure to the language
outside of the classroom, there was, as has already been explained, an emphasis on a
task-supported approach (Ellis, 2003), that is, the use of tasks as a means by which
learners could activate their existing knowledge of the L2 for the purpose of developing
fluency. Therefore the researcher added, for the third criterion, the following question:
‘Does the task allow learners to automatize/use language they have already been taught
on a previous occasion? The conceptualization of a ‘task’ as presented in Table 3
corresponds with what Littlewood (2004) placed midway and to the right of his ‘focus
on forms/focus on meaning’ continuum at the level of communicative language practice
(practising pre-taught language in a context where it communicates new information,
e.g. information-gap activities or ‘personalized’ questions).

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10 Language Teaching Research 

Table 3. Questions relating to coding of criteria.

Questions Required
answer
1 The primary focus should be on meaning
Does the learner function as a language user and not a language learner? yes
Is the learner primarily concerned with encoding and decoding messages, yes
not with focusing on linguistic form?
2 There should be some kind of gap
Is this gap closed as a result of the communication that takes place? yes
As a result of the communication does the learner find out something yes
they didn’t know?
3 Learners should have to rely on their own resources (linguistic and non-
linguistic)
So that they can do the task, are the learners ‘taught’ the language they no
will need?
Does the task allow learners to automatize/use language they have already yes
been taught on a previous occasion?
4 There is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language
Does the language serve as a means for achieving the outcome rather yes
than as an end in its own right?
Does achieving the outcome determine when the task is completed? yes

For each of the above criteria, two tasks are presented, in Table 4, from the data set
of the current study, one that fulfilled the criterion and another that didn’t. Comments
from the researcher that explain how and why each task did or did not meet the specified
criteria are in italics.
At times there is overlap between criteria – for example, the teaching of the partitive
articles (see ‘not fulfilled’ under ‘rely on own resources’) meant that there was not a
consistent focus on meaning because of the expectation that learners would be focused
on linguistic form while completing the task.

5 Reliability
The researcher coded all 43 tasks herself and then gave 23 of the tasks to an independent
rater, a PhD student researching in the area of TBLT. The researcher used two tasks
(separate from the 23) to discuss with and train the second rater. The second rater then
rated eight tasks on her own, following which she and the researcher discussed any
differences. The researcher revised one rating as a result. The second rater then rated a
further 15 tasks. Percentage agreements for the four categories for the 23 tasks are
displayed in Table 5. It is perhaps not surprising that coding for ‘Learners should have
to rely on their own resources’ produced the lowest rate of agreement, given the degree
of subjectivity involved in making this judgement. This was largely related to the fact
that, as previously mentioned, teachers did not always provide enough information for
a more reliable assessment of this criterion.

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Erlam 11

Table 4. Tasks that did and did not meet criteria.

Fulfilled Not fulfilled

Focus on meaning:
Beginner learners of Spanish had to design Beginner learners of Spanish had to collect
a teenager’s ideal bedroom. They then cards that matched their own in terms of
presented their bedrooms in Spanish to colours. They asked the question que color te
the class who voted on the best. gusta (‘what colour do you like?’) to find out
Students were using language to what colour their partner had on their card.
communicate their own meaning/encoding The question students asked had no relation to
and decoding messages, rather than just their own colour preferences. It neither needed to
functioning as language learners. be encoded nor decoded for the game to succeed.
Students were using language as learners only.
Some kind of gap:
Beginner students of German were to Elementary learners of Japanese had to
play ‘Battleships’. Each student needed discuss the opening hours of a restaurant or
to position submarines and destroyers business on a picture they were given to look
on a numbered grid. Then in pairs, facing at together.
each other so they could not see their No gap was closed as a result of this
partner’s grid, they had to aim ‘hits’ to communication and learners did not find out
destroy their opponent’s navy. anything they didn’t already know.
Students did not know where their opponent’s
navy was on the grid (gap). Each ‘hit’ was a
guess and their partner’s response told them
whether or not they had been successful.
Rely on own resources:
Elementary learners of French were, Beginner students of French had to buy and
in small groups, to plan and present a sell groceries at small shops set up around
5-course French menu. In a pre-task the classroom. In the pre-task, students were
students were reminded of the prior taught vocabulary for food items, for shops
learning they had done in a unit on and some expressions that they would need
French cuisine and the resources such as for conversations in shops. They were then
homework sheets that they could draw taught the use of partitive articles with nouns
on to help them. with the expectation that they would use
Students are reminded of the language they these when asking for food items.
already have been exposed to that might help Students were taught the language they needed
them with this task. immediately prior to performing the task.
Clearly defined outcome:
In pairs, beginner learners of Mandarin In pairs, beginner learners of Mandarin were
were given the role of ‘speaker’ and to devise questions that they would ask of
‘listener-artist’. The ‘speaker’ had to each other. The outcome was ‘that students
create an oral description of a person will use the data they collect to answer their
that the listener then drew and coloured questions’.
… ‘the visual outcome was a measure of The use of the language was not distinct from
students’ attempts to negotiate meaning’. achieving the outcome.
The completed picture was distinct from the
use of language and determined when the
task was completed.

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12 Language Teaching Research 

Table 5. Percentage agreement with the second rater for all criteria.

Criteria Percentage agreement

1. Primary focus on meaning 100%
2. Some kind of gap 100%
3. Learners relying on own resources 87%
4. Clearly defined outcome 91%

IX Results
The first research question asked how successful the teachers were in designing tasks
that fulfilled the four Ellis criteria (2003). Of the 43 tasks in the data set, 20 (47%) ful-
filled all of the four Ellis criteria (2003). A further 15 (35%) fulfilled three out of the four
criteria, meaning that a total of 82% of all the tasks fulfilled three or more criteria. There
was only one task that was rated as fulfilling none of the criteria.
The second research question investigated those criteria of task design that teachers
found most difficult to satisfy. The most difficult criterion for teachers to satisfy was the
third: learners need to rely on their own resources. Twenty-eight tasks (67%) respected
this criterion, 15 did not. The second criterion that teachers in this study found difficult
to fulfil was the second: there needs to be some kind of gap. There were 34 tasks (79%
of the data set) that incorporated, in their design, a ‘communication’ gap whereby learners
found out something that they didn’t already know. Nine tasks did not incorporate a gap
in their design.
The third research question focused on the criteria of task design that teachers found
easier to satisfy. The criterion that was easiest for teachers to satisfy in their task design
was the last one: there is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language.
Thirty-nine tasks (90%) satisfied this criterion, only five did not. The first criterion: there
should be a primary focus on meaning, was one that teachers found relatively easy to
satisfy. This criterion was respected by thirty-six teachers (84%); only seven teachers
had difficulty fulfilling it.

V Discussion
Results demonstrated that almost half of the teachers on the programme (47%) were able
to demonstrate that they could incorporate all four of the key components of a task in
their design. Furthermore, more than three quarters of teachers were able to incorporate
three of the key components. If one considers that being able to fulfil three of the key
components of task design is evidence of an activity that is placed further towards
Littlewood’s (2004) ‘focus on meaning’ end than the ‘focus on forms’ end, then this is a
pleasing result in terms of the course objectives of the TPDL programme.
There are a number of possible reasons that could explain why the criterion that was
most difficult to implement was the one requiring learners to rely on their own resources.
One stand-out feature of all 43 tasks in this data set was that they were all primarily³
designed as output-prompting rather than input-providing tasks (Ellis, 2012). It is not

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entirely clear why teachers did not design input-providing tasks, which were presented
to teachers during their pedagogy course. A possible reason is that the ‘in-school support’
component of the programme required teachers to teach lessons where students were
engaged in language production, which may have inadvertently given the message that
input-providing tasks were not suitable for their assignments. Another possible reason is
that the wording of the four Ellis criteria, which the teachers were continuously exposed
to during the course, predominantly refers to production tasks, or, at least the wording
facilitates the impression that this is the case. For example, Ellis’s (2003, p. 9) description
of a ‘gap’ as something that ‘motivates learners to use language’ suggests productive
rather than receptive language. Considering the fact that the learners for whom these
‘output-prompting’ tasks were designed were, almost without exception, at elementary/
beginner level in terms of proficiency, it is perhaps not surprising that teachers experienced
difficulty in crafting tasks which would allow them to depend on their own resources. An
examination of those 16 tasks that did not respect this third criterion shows that, making
sure that the gap between the learners’ level of proficiency and the level demanded by the
task did not become too wide (Van den Branden, 2006), was difficult for many teachers
to achieve. An example was a teacher of Year 9 beginner learners of Mandarin who told
students that they were to make a questionnaire and carry out a class survey to find out
who was most like them in terms of daily routine. When the teacher realized that the
students seemed confused, she taught ‘a wide range [of] vocabulary and structures’,
including question forms. This meant that students were heavily reliant on this new lan-
guage when completing the task, rather than on linguistic resources that they already had.
It also meant that students might have had difficulty encoding and decoding messages
(Criterion 1) because of the requirement to focus on new linguistic forms. It is interesting
to note that this teacher was aware of the problem, commenting in their task evaluation that
‘students were not quite ready for the task … they didn’t internalize the target language and
use it for communication’. This teaching of vocabulary and structures would seem to
violate Ellis and Shintani’s (2013) specification that learners not be ‘taught the language
they need to complete the task’. The difference, however, between teaching and ‘borrowing
from the input’ to complete the task, which Ellis and Shintani do allow, might not always
be clear. An example of ‘borrowing from the input’ could be the two teachers who had
designed tasks that allowed students to draw on their own resources, but who commented
on the fact that another time they would include greater opportunities for students to be
exposed to language input prior to starting the task (an example of what Willis and Willis
(2007) would call a priming function, as discussed further below). Both teachers specifically
mentioned listening activities. One of these teachers had her Year 12 intermediate level
learners of Japanese plan a party and negotiate consensus about time, music, food and so
on. She commented that as a pre-task she could have had ‘a brief listening task … where
learners were exposed to a group of native speakers arranging a party.’
Another problem that seemed evident from the data was that some teachers designed
tasks that did not integrate well with previous language lessons. One reason for this
could be that the way the assignment was presented, requiring the design and evaluation
of a ‘one-off’ lesson, did not encourage teachers to think of how the task they taught
could arise out of, and complement, other work. One example was the teacher who asked
her Year 10 elementary students of Spanish to find the best person in the class for them

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to go on holiday with in terms of similar interests. She drew up and modelled for them a
grid of questions they could ask but found in her evaluation that students tended to stick
too closely to this template even asking classmates the incomplete question ‘where
do you want …?’, rather than completing it with an appropriate phrase such as ‘to ski,
dance’ and so on. In her evaluation she commented on the need to be clearer about planning
a ‘language intention’ and confessed that she had thought only of the task and not its
place within a curriculum – ‘I had not thought about … [where] this task would fit in the
larger picture of the topic or year in general.’
Another reason that teachers found this criterion difficult to implement seemed to
stem from their understanding of how a focus on form related to the sequencing of a task-
based lesson. They had been taught that a task-based sequence did not start with a focus
on new grammar as it is unlikely that learners can use an unfamiliar form to communicate
meaningfully within the same lesson sequence (Willis and Willis, 2007). A pre-task
should, therefore, not include new grammar, but could provide learners with key relevant
vocabulary in what Willis and Willis (2007, p. 24) term a ‘priming’ function. In coding
the tasks then, to establish to what extent they met this third criterion, the researcher was
looking for tasks that did not require learners to use grammatical forms that they had not
already been taught in a prior lesson. The wording of the criterion ‘rely on their own
linguistic resources’, whilst explained in class on a number of occasions, may not have
been the best way of reminding the teachers that this would preclude a focus on new
grammar prior to the task. Furthermore, many of the teachers in the programme were
familiar with and had been trained to teach according to the PPP lesson format, which
does start with the presentation of grammar (Richards & Rodgers, 2014), and, it would
seem, that this different way of thinking about grammar was difficult for them. Zheng and
Borg (2014) also found that teachers had difficulty understanding the role of grammar in
TBLT, documenting the case of a teacher whose lessons took the form of grammatical
explanations and then controlled practice.
The wording of this criterion has already been mentioned. It is possible that teachers,
despite explanations, may not have fully understood what is meant by ‘own linguistic
resources’. It is perhaps not clear, for example, whether a student ‘borrowing language
from input’ is relying on their ‘own resources’ or not. In fact this criterion is meant to
allow learners the final choice of which language they should use in order to complete
the task, rather than specifying or prescribing the language they should draw on (Ellis,
2003), but this may not have been understood by the participants in this study.
An example of a task that was appropriate in terms of the level of language proficiency
of the learners it was designed for, and in terms of how it was supported by previous
work covered in class, was taught to a Year 10 class of French students. The teacher
described these students, who were in their second year of French, as academically
above average. They had, in a previous lesson, been exposed to the use of the French
comparative and the terms plus (‘more’) or moins (‘less’), so that the comparative was
not a new and unfamiliar language form for them. In a pre-task students were asked to
solve animal riddles by asking questions (e.g. tu es un lion? ‘are you a lion?’) of the
teacher, who replied using comparative expressions such as non, mais je suis aussi
dangereux qu’un lion (‘no but I am as dangerous as a lion’). In the task itself, students
made up their own riddles which they then had their classmates and the class as a
whole solve. It is interesting to note that the pre-task required students to work with

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language input and it was only in the task itself that students were given opportunities
to produce language.
The second criterion that teachers found difficult to respect was ‘there needs to be
some kind of gap’. This may be due to ambiguity in the way that this criterion could be
understood. According to Ellis and Shintani (2013) task design should incorporate
the need to express an opinion, to convey information or infer meaning. In doing this,
students may well be facing a gap in their linguistic knowledge and pushing their linguistic
resources to negotiate the meaning of words or structures that they don’t know.
It is interesting to note that some teachers in this study understood that the ‘gap’ was
the gap in language knowledge, rather than a communicative gap (it is perhaps unfortunate
that the same word ‘gap’ is used in these two different ways). One teacher said: ‘the
students’ gap in knowledge was the ability to express likes and dislikes’ and another
mentioned the ‘authentic gap in their knowledge’ of ‘not knowing how to read Chinese
characters’. A third teacher had actually designed a task that included a communication
gap, in that students had to find out where hidden treasure was, but she did not identify
this feature of the task as the one that fulfilled the criterion of a gap. Instead she said:
‘there was definitely a gap as my students had not used or heard of this new vocabulary’.
One task planned for a gap but there wasn’t one – students had to design children’s books
but there was no ‘audience’ of readers. Other similar tasks did have ‘audiences’ but,
because there was no purpose for the audience to listen or read (Klapper, 2003), it was
difficult to know to what extent a gap had been closed, something had been ‘found out’
or even that the ‘audience’ had engaged at any level with what had been communicated
(however, because there was an ‘audience’ these tasks were coded by the researcher as
having a gap). One example was the teacher who had her Year 5 beginner students of
French perform mini- dramas to their classmates. She commented ‘it was a task, but not a
very good one. There wasn’t much of a gap apart from the audience observing. I justified
it by saying the gap was the audience’.
From these difficulties that some of the participants in this study demonstrate in
understanding the definitional criteria against which an activity can be judged as being
task-like or not (Ellis, 2003; Ellis & Shintani, 2013), it is interesting to reflect on the
extent to which these criteria are unambiguous or, indeed, even accessible to language
teachers. Examples discussed suggest that they are open to being interpreted in ways that
are not intended and, furthermore, that a correct interpretation may require an under-
standing of some of the more complex theoretical principles underlying second language
learning (e.g. the notion that learners cannot attend to meaning and form at the same
time). The challenge for the language teacher educator is, perhaps, first, to consider to
what extent the criteria could be reworded so as to deal with any ambiguity, and, second,
to consider how the technical knowledge of second language acquisition research (Ellis,
1997) may be made accessible to the practitioner.
Teachers in this study found it relatively easy to incorporate a ‘clearly defined
outcome other than the use of language’ in their task design. For many tasks, the outcome
was winning a game (e.g. Go Fish or Happy families), a completed picture or the
information that had been found out as a result of a class survey. These outcomes
corroborate Van den Branden’s recommendations (2006, p. 60) that teachers select,
for beginner language learners, relatively neutral or universal worlds, ‘for instance
the world of playing games’, that enable students to work in contexts about which

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they already have knowledge. A creative and, for the Year 8 beginner students of
Japanese, very pertinent example of the latter was the survey completed in order to
find out what activity the class, as a whole, felt should replace the cancelled PE class
that had left a gap in their weekly timetable.
One possible reason why teachers found this criterion easier is the younger age group
of students represented in this study. Only two teachers taught students above Year 10,
meaning that 41 out of the 43 teachers taught students at Year 10 (approximate age 14)
or below. Furthermore, a majority of classes (23) were at primary or intermediate level,
rather than secondary. Teachers were perhaps, very aware that students would, in order
to be motivated to complete a task, need a goal that would be other than the use of the
language itself. Also pertinent is the fact that, for many of these students, particularly
those at secondary level, learning a foreign/second language was an option rather than a
curriculum requirement, and that teachers had therefore learnt to be very adept at making
language learning fun and enjoyable, in the hope that students would be motivated to
continue. The outcome of a task is not so much an end in itself as a means to motivate the
learners to complete it (Dörnyei, 2002).
The criterion: ‘there should be a primary focus on meaning’, was one that teachers
found relatively easy to satisfy. However, for some teachers, it appeared that it was
difficult to relinquish the concept of ‘language learner’ in favour of that of ‘language
user’. One example was the Year 10 teacher of elementary learners of Japanese who
had students select ‘a boyfriend’ from a picture sheet of 10 boys. In pairs a partner had
to find out who their partner’s boyfriend was and vice versa, which necessitated asking
questions about appearance/physical characteristics in order to identify and eliminate
possibilities. However, this teacher stipulated that each student needed to ask 10 ques-
tions even though they might have found the answer already. At some stage in each
pair, therefore, when the ‘boyfriend’ had been successfully identified, it was obvious
that learners would no longer be communicating as language users in order to bridge a
communicative gap (thus not consistently respecting Ellis criterion two either) but that
they would be functioning as language learners, in order to meet the teacher’s requirement
of ‘10 questions’.
In this study, all criteria were given equal weighting, however, Ellis (2009) identifies
criteria one and four (focus on meaning, an outcome) as being those that are key for a
task to be ‘task-like’ and the two most likely to differentiate a task from a situational
grammar exercise. It is interesting and encouraging to note that these are the two criteria
that the teachers in this study found easiest to respect in their task design. This is evidence
that teachers were able to design activities that would place them more at the ‘task’
end of a continuum and that were more likely to promote a focus on meaning than on
language forms.

1 Implications
As mentioned previously, the crucial impetus for this study, was that the researcher
wanted to understand what changes might need to be made to the TPDL programme
the participants were involved in, to help them better understand the notion of a lan-
guage ‘task’, with the idea that this would be a necessary prerequisite to the successful

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implementation of TBLT. The findings of this study have potential implications for
other professional development programmes which aim to give teachers the skills to
implement TBLT or a task-supported pedagogy in their teaching contexts.
Teachers, especially those who teach beginner/elementary learners, need to be helped
to understand the importance of making sure that their learners will be able to meet the
language demands of a task, perhaps by providing appropriate support and resources.
Chan (2012) highlights the importance of scaffolding and claims that advance planning
and sequencing is crucial in a task-based pedagogy. For the teachers in this programme
an emphasis in their professional development on two of Nunan’s seven principles (2004,
p. 25) underpinning TBLT could be helpful. The first, ‘Scaffolding’, stresses the impor-
tance of providing support and of not requiring learners to produce language that has not
previously been introduced to them prior to the task-based lesson sequence. Willis and
Willis’s (2007) notion of ‘priming’ could also be helpful here, an example of which is
providing learners with vocabulary that might be of assistance in completing a task (as
opposed to requiring students to use grammatical structures they have not previously
been taught). Teachers may also need further clarification that ‘own resources’ refers to
allowing students freedom in the language they can choose to complete a task, rather
than specifying the use of particular language (Ellis, 2003).
The second of Nunan’s principles that may be helpful is that of ‘Task dependency’,
the requirement that a task should grow out of those that have preceded it. As part of this,
an understanding of the receptive- to- productive principle, stressing the importance of,
and modelling the use of input-providing as well as output-prompting tasks, might help
teachers better sequence tasks in relation to student proficiency.
Another recommendation would be to ensure that teachers understand the difference
between a ‘communicative’ gap and a language gap. In planning, it might be helpful to
stress that the question ‘what does a learner find out as a result of the communication that
takes place?’ (criterion two) is different to the question ‘what language may the learner
learn as a result of doing this task?’ and that the answer to each would also be expected
to be different. In planning for a ‘gap’ in the design of a language task, the teacher also
needs to plan not only for the encoding, but also the decoding of messages. If the audience,
or addressee, of a message is unable to decode it (maybe because of proficiency/
comprehension issues) or is given no goal that would motivate him/her to want to engage
with it, then it is possible that no gap will be closed.
Lastly, teachers in this programme would benefit from more concrete examples of the
difference between having students function as language users and language learners.
Samuda’s (2007) concept of ‘detasking’ might be useful here, to demonstrate those
junctures where a task no longer has learners engaging with meaning.

2 Limitations
One of the limitations of this research is that the data set was potentially a biased sample.
If this were the case it is important not to overstate the effectiveness of the learning of the
participants of this programme, but rather to endorse the modifications that have been
suggested in the previous section. Teachers were asked to make their Learning Inquiry
assignments available for the study after these had been marked and returned to them and

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18 Language Teaching Research 

so it is therefore possible that the teachers who did better/ were more satisfied with their
marks were motivated to contribute. Grades were available for 32 of the Learning Inquiry
assignments in this data set and did show that those who performed better tended to
participate. The average grade for all course participants was 70%, the average grade for
those who agreed to participate in this study was 79%. It is important to realize that a
more balanced data set may have produced results that were not as positive in terms of
demonstrating that teachers were able to understand and design tasks. On the other hand
the assignments were not marked according to task design so much as according to task
evaluation, so that there is not necessarily any relationship between teachers’ ‘task as
workplan’ and the grade allocated to the assignment.
A further limitation, that has been referred to earlier, is that any research that looks
at the task as workplan is limited in that it provides very little information about what
happened in the language classroom. It is quite possible that teachers taught language
tasks that fulfilled all four criteria in this study but which did not result in any significant
language learning, whilst other teachers taught ‘tasks’ that did not meet the specified
criteria but which led to significant language gains. Another issue was that at times
participants did not provide as much information as would have been ideal about their
task designs, this was particularly relevant, as has already been discussed, to the third
criterion (‘Learners should have to rely on their own resources’). In retrospect the
researcher could have interviewed the participants of the study following the submission
and marking of their assignments to allow for clarification and thus for greater reliability
in coding of results.
The criteria against which the tasks the teachers designed in this study were evaluated
were Ellis’s (2005). These were chosen as they were the most often referred to during the
course, being those against which the lecturer consistently evaluated the tasks she used
with the teachers, and so, it was assumed, those that were most salient. However, it was
not a requirement that the teachers had to design their tasks according to these criteria
only, and it is worth considering to what extent the results of this study might have been
different were other criteria used.
In the coding of tasks against the criteria used in the study, the researcher adopted a
yes/no approach. In future research of this nature it could be worth considering to what
extent it may be helpful to evaluate tasks along a continuum, as in Littlewood (2004), for
example. This would also make it easy to see at what point an activity was no longer a
‘task’, something that this study did not address.

VI Conclusions
This study investigates how well teachers enrolled in a professional development
programme were able to design tasks that fulfilled four criteria specified by Ellis
(2003) as useful in differentiating a task from a language exercise, on the premise that
adequate understanding of the construct of task underpins successful implementation
of task-based or task-supported language teaching. Results show that over three quarters
of teachers were able to design activities that were more like language tasks than like
language exercises. The research context is one that has been under-represented in the

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Erlam 19

literature to date, that is, the foreign language classroom (i.e. languages other than
English) in school settings with young language learners (primarily aged under 14 years).
The criterion that was most difficult for teachers to incorporate in task design, perhaps
not surprisingly given the low level of proficiency of most of the students taught by the
participants in this study, was the one that required students to rely on their own resources.
Another criterion that caused some difficulty was the one that required the task to have a
gap that could be closed by the communication taking place. Some teachers understood
this to be a language knowledge gap rather than a communicative gap. The criterion that
was easiest for teachers was the requirement that the task have an outcome. It was
hypothesized that the teachers in this study were used to having to motivate language
learners, as studying a language is usually a choice in New Zealand schools, and that,
therefore, they found it easy to build in a goal that would entice the students to complete
the task.
The article presents a range of suggestions for how Professional Development pro-
grammes that aim to upskill teachers to implement TBLT, or a task-supported approach
to language teaching, may better help teachers understand and design language tasks.
It also discusses the extent to which the criteria, against which the tasks in this study
are judged, are unambiguous and accessible to the language teacher practitioner.
It is important to remember that this research provides very little data about how the
tasks were completed and no information about any language learning that occurred when
participants implemented their proposed workplans in their classrooms. Investigating the
correspondence between the task as workplan and the task as process would be a fruit-
ful direction for future research. Another possible area for future research would be to
investigate teachers’ evaluations of their proposed tasks, so as to get information about
how teachers might have further progressed in and revised their understanding about tasks
and TBLT.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the clear and perceptive insights of the reviewers who pushed my thinking further
with respect to this article. I am also grateful for the insights and suggestions of the editor, Frank Boers.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. One teacher in the current study was teaching French in a tertiary context but was allowed to
participate in the programme because the target enrolment quota had not been reached.
2. The teachers of Samoan and Tongan had some students in their classes who had been exposed
to the language at home, but still considered their students as beginners. In some other classes,
some students did have a background in the language being taught; for example, in some of

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20 Language Teaching Research 

the Mandarin classes there were students who were recent immigrants from China or children
of immigrants.
3. A number of tasks also had students working with input. These were mainly tasks where
students were engaged in asking each other for information and where they of necessity had
to attend to input as well as produce output.

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