Popular methodology

Approaches, methods, procedures and techniques

This chapter looks at how theory has been realised in methodological practice. Within the
general area of methodology, people talk about approaches, methods, techniques, procedures
and models, all of which go into the practice of English teaching. These terms, though
somewhat vague, are definable:
• Approach: people use the term approach to refer to theories about the nature of language
and language learning which are the source of the way things are done in the classroom and
which provide the reasons for doing them. An approach describes how language is used and
how its constituent parts interlock - it offers a model of language competence. An approach
describes how people acquire their knowledge of the language and makes statements about
the conditions which will promote successful language learning.
• Method: a method is the practical realisation of an approach. The originators of a method
have arrived at decisions about types of activities, roles of teachers and learners, the kinds ot
material which will be helpful and some model of syllabus organisation. Methods include
various procedures and techniques (see below) as part of their standard fare.
When methods havefixedprocedures, informed by a clearly articulated approach,
they are easy to describe. However, if a method takes procedures and techniques from a
wide range of sources (some of which are used in other methods or are informed by other
beliefs), it is more difficult to continue describing it as a 'method'. We will return to this
discussion when we discuss postmethod realities in B2.
• Procedure: a procedure is an ordered sequence of techniques. For example, a popular
dictation procedure starts when students are put in small groups. Each group then sends
one representative to thefrontof the class to read (and remember) the first line of a poem
which has been placed on a desk there. Each student then goes back to their respective group
and dictates that line. Each group then sends a second student up to read the second line.
The procedure continues until one group has written the whole poem (see Example 5 in
Chapter 19C).
A procedure is a sequence which can be described in terms such as First you do this, then
you do that.... Smaller than a method, it is bigger than a technique.
• Tedunque: a common technique when using video orfilmmaterial is called silent viewing
(see Chapter 18, Bi). This is where the teacher plays the video with no sound. Silent viewing
is a single activity rather than a sequence, and as such is a technique rather than a whole
procedure. Likewise thefingertechnique is used by some teachers; they hold up their hands
 POPULAR METHODOLOGY

and allocate a word to each of their five fingers, e.g. He is not playing tennis and then by
bringing the is and the not fingers together, show how the verb is contracted into isn't.
Another technique is to tell all the students in a group to murmur a new word or phrase to
themselves for a few seconds just to get their tongues round it.

This use and mis-use of these terms can make discussions of comparative methodology
somewhat confusing. Some methodologists, for example, have new insights and claim a new
approach as a result. Others claim the status of method for a technique or procedure. Some
methods start as procedures and techniques which seem to work and for which an approach
is then developed. Some approaches have to go in search of procedures and techniques with
which to form a method. Some methods are explicit about the approach they exemplify and
the procedures they employ; others are not.
What the interested teacher needs to do when confronted with a new method, for example,
is to see if and/or how it incorporates theories of language and learning. What procedures does
it incorporate? Are they appropriate and effective for the classroom situation that teacher works
with? In the case of techniques and activities, two questions seem worth asking: Are they satisfying
for both students and teachers? and Do they actually achieve what they set out to achieve?
Popular methodology includes ideas at all the various levels we have discussed, and it
is these methods, procedures and approaches which influence the current state of English
language teaching.

A1 Grammar-translation, Direct method and Audiolingualism

Many of the seeds which have grown into present-day methodology were sown in debates
between more and less formal attitudes to language, and crucially, the place of the students'
first language in the classroom. Before the nineteenth century many formal language
learners were scholars who studied rules of grammar and consulted lists of foreign words in
dictionaries (though, of course, countless migrants and traders picked up new languages in
other ways, too). But in the nineteenth century moves were made to bring foreign-language
learning into school curriculums, and so something more was needed. This gave rise to the
Grammar-translation method (or rather series of methods).
Typically, Grammar-translation methods did exactly what they said. Students were given
explanations of individual points of grammar, and then they were given sentences which
exemplified these points. These sentences had to be translated from the target language (L2)
back to the students' first language (Li) and vice versa.
A number of features of the Grammar-translation method are worth commenting on. In
the first place, language was treated at the level of the sentence only, with little study, certainly
at the early stages, of longer texts. Secondly, there was little if any consideration of the spoken
language. And thirdly, accuracy was considered to be a necessity.
The Direct method, which arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, was the product of a
reform movement which was reacting to the restrictions of Grammar-translation. Translation
was abandoned in favour of the teacher and the students speaking together, relating the
grammatical forms they were studying to objects and pictures, etc. in order to establish their
meaning. The sentence was still the main object of interest, and accuracy was all important.
Crucially (because of the influence this has had for many years since), it was considered vitally
important that only the target language should be used in the classroom. This may have been
63
CHAPTER 4

a reaction agamst i n ^ ^
native speakers who started, in the twenUeth ^ ^ f ^ l e s s o n , A / w e shall see
created a powerful prejud.ce agamst the presence o * K ^ ^ n classes, this portion
in Chapter 7 D when we discuss monolingual, bdmgual ^ * J L 2 . o n l y methods were
has shifted dramatically in the last few years, but for many decades omy
promoted all over the world.
When behaviourist accounts ot language learmn, ^ ^ ^ ~ t h e A u d i o U ngual
(see Chapter 3, A2), the Direct method morphed, espeadly m he USA m t c ^ £
method Using the stimulus-response-remforcement model, tt attempted, through a contm
p driBs fom h i,s substi,utl
I c e s s o f 1 1 positive reinforcement, to engender good habits in language learners.
^ U - -**»-«'« » *~ * ; °; ~
these drills so that, in small steps, the student was constantly learning and, moreover,
Z
shielded from the possibility of making mistakes by the design of the drill.
The following example shows a typical AudioUngual drill:
TEACHER: There's a cup on the table... repeat
STUDENTS: There's a cup on the table.
TEACHER: Spoon.
STUDENTS: There's a spoon on the table.
TEACHER: Book.
STUDENTS: There's a book on the table.
TEACHER: On the chair.
STUDENTS: There's a book on the chair.

ETC
r

Much AudioUngual teaching stayed at the sentence level, and there was little placing o
language in any kind of real-life context. A premium was still placed on accuracy; indee
AudioUngual methodology does its best to banish mistakes completely. The purpose was
habit-formation through constant repetition of correct utterances, encouraged and supported
by positive reinforcement.

-, i. T
Presentation, practice and production
A variation on Audiolingualism is the procedure most often referred to (since the advent
of Communicative Language Teaching - see below) as PPP, which stands for presentation,
practice and production. This grew out of structural-situational teaching whose mam
departure from Audiolingualism was to place the language in clear situational contexts.
In this procedure the teacher introduces a situation which contextualises the language
to be taught. The language, too, is then presented. The students now practise the language
using accurate reproduction techniques such as choral repetition (where the students repeat
a word, phrase or sentence all together with the teacher 'conducting'), individual repetition
(where individual students repeat a word, phrase or sentence at the teacher's urging), and
cue-response drills (where the teacher gives a cue such as cinema, nominates a student by
name or by looking or pointing, and the student makes the desired response, e.g. Would you
like to come to the cinema?). Cue-response drills have similarities with the classic kind of
AudioUngual drill we saw above, but because they are contextualised by the situation that has
 POPULAR METHODOLOGY

been presented, they carry more meaning than a simple substitution drill. Later, the students,
using the new language, make sentences of their own, and this is referred to as production.
The following elementary level example demonstrates the PPP procedure:
• Presentation: the teacher shows the students the following picture and asks them whether
the people in it are at work or on holiday to elicit the fact that they are on holiday.

Mrs Andrade

The teacher points to the teenage boy and attempts to elicit the sentence He's listening to
music by saying Can anybody tell me... Jared...? or asking the question What's Jared doing
... anybody? The teacher then models the sentence (He's listening to music) before isolating
the grammar she wants to focus on (he's), distorting it (he's... he is... he is), putting it back
together again (he's... he's) and then giving the model in a natural way once more (Listen ...
He's listening to music... he's listening to music). She may accompany this demonstration of
form rules by using some physical means such as bringing two hands (for he and is) together
to show how the contraction works, or by using the finger technique (see above).

Practice: The teacher gets the students to repeat the sentence He's listening to music in
chorus. She may then nominate certain students to repeat the sentence individually, and
she corrects any mistakes she hears. Now she goes back and models more sentences from
the picture (Usha's reading a booh Mrs Andrade is writing an email etc.), getting choral and
individual repetition where she thinks this is necessary. Now she is in a position to conduct
a slightly freer kind of drill than the Audiolingual one above:

TEACHER: Can anyone tell me? . Usha?... Yes, Sergio

STUDENT: She's reading a book.
TEACHER: Good.
ETC
In this cue-response drill the teacher gives the cue (Usha) before nominating a student
(Sergio) who will give the response (She's reading a book). By cueing before nominating
she keeps everyone alert. She will avoid nominating students in a predictable order for the
same reason.
Usually the teacher puts the students in pairs to practise the sentences a bit more before
listening to a few examples just to check that the learning has been effective.
65
 CHAPTER 4

, Production: the end point of the PPP cycle is production, what some trainers have called
'immediate creativity*. Here the students are asked to use the new language (in this case
the present continuous) in sentences of their own. For example, the teacher may get the
students to think about what their friends and family are doing at this moment. They
must now come up with sentences such as My mother's working at the hospital 1 think, My
brothers lying on the beach. Ym sure. He's on holiday, etc.

AS PPP and alternatives to PPP

The PPP procedure, which was offered to teacher trainees as a significant teaching procedure
from the middle of the 1960s onwards (though not then referred to as PPP), came under a
sustained attack in the 1990s. It was, critics argued, clearly teacher-centred (at least in the
kind of procedure which we have demonstrated above), and therefore sits uneasily in a more
humanistic and learner-centred framework. It also seems to assume that students learn in
straight lines' - that is, startingfromno knowledge, through highly restricted sentence-based
utterances and on to immediate production. Yet human learning probably isn't like that; it s
more random, more convoluted. And, by breaking language down into small pieces to learn,
it may be cheating the students of a language which, in Tessa Woodward's phrase, is full of
'interlocking variables and systems' (Woodward 1993: 3). Michael Lewis suggested that PPP
was inadequate because it reflected neither the nature of language nor the nature of learning
(Lewis 1993: 190), and Jim Scrivener even wrote that it was 'fundamentally disabling, not
enabling' (Scrivener 1994a: 15).
In response to these criticisms many people have offered
variations on PPP and alternatives to it. As long ago as
l
1982 Keith Johnson suggested the deep-end strategy' as
an alternative (Johnson 1982), where by encouraging the
students into immediate production (throwing them
in at the deep end), you turn the procedure on its head.
The teacher can now see if and where students are having
problems during this production phase and return to
either presentation or practice as and when necessary after
the production phase is over. A few years later, Donn Byrne
suggested much the same thing (Byrne 1986:3), joining the
FIGURE 1: Byrne's 'alternative
three phases in a circle (see Figure 1). Teachers and students
approach'
can decide at which stage to enter the procedure.
A different tribgy of teaching sequence elements is ESA: Engage, Study and Activate
& ;
(Harmer 2007: Chapter 4).
a d r enme W n P a g e 58 a r U S a l a n d a f f e c t
le^ r TK° ' *? T ° ' ° ** S o n a n t for successful

7 deSC eS ny teaChbg and karnin

onlrslth^ ^ ^ ! S d " « n t where the focus is
2 ZZAOZ f
C mma
° t- " a ph is de and used or ,he
hether
*" Kla,ive S
«*•"»* P = * to-"-*- patterns,
*;:r;r ; zi:z S I
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ask w r
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re ™ o to
66
form s £ z ^::z::
forms' svllabm nr „

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r
^uaaUy, m this model, study may be part of a 'focus on
Clther b y t h e t e a c h e r o r thro
"gh their own noticing activities.
**—*^ »
 POPULAR METHODOLOGY

A stands for activate and this means any stage at which students are encouraged to use all
and/or any of the language they know. Communicative tasks, for example, (see page 70) are
designed to activate the students' language knowledge. But students also activate their language
knowledge when they read for pleasure or for general interest. Indeed any meaning-focused
activity where the language is not restricted provokes students into language activation.
ESA allows for three basic lesson procedures. In the first ('Straight arrows', see Figure 2)
the sequence is ESA, much like PPP. The teacher engages students by presenting a picture or
a situation, or by drawing them in by some other means. At the study stage of the procedure,
the meaning and form of the language are explained. The teacher then models the language
and the students repeat and practise it. Finally, they activate the new language by using it in
sentences of their own.
A 'Boomerang' procedure, on the other hand, follows a more task-based or deep-end
approach (see Figure 3). Here the order is EAS; the teacher gets the students engaged before
asking them to do something like a written task, a communication game or a role-play. Based
on what happens there, the students will then, after the activity has finished, study some
aspect of language which they lacked or which they used incorrectly.
'Patchwork' lessons (see Figure 4), which are different from the previous two procedures, may
follow a variety of sequences. For example, engaged students are encouraged to activate their
knowledge before studying one and then another language element, and then returning to more
activating tasks, after which the teacher re-engages them before doing some more study, etc.
What the Engage/Study/Activate trilogy has tried to capture is the fact that PPP is just'... a
tool used by teachers for one of their many possible purposes' (Swan 2005b: 380, my italics).
In other words, PPP is extremely useful in a focus-on-forms lesson, especially at lower levels,
but is irrelevant in a skills lesson, where focus-on-form may occur as a result of something
students hear or read. It is useful, perhaps, in teaching grammar points such as the use of can
and can't, but has little place when students are analysing their own language use after doing a

Engage Engage

I
Study
Study

I
Activate
FIGURE 2: A Straight
arrows lesson procedure
"
Activate ^
&SF FIGURE 3: A Boomerang
lesson procedure

FIGURE 4: An example of a
Patchwork lesson procedure

67
 CHAPTER 4

communicative task. Never,he,ess, a look a, modern coursebooks shows ' ^ P P P i ^ e £

well, bu, in a context of a wide range of other techniques a n ^ P ™ ' * ^ ^ " ^™
that PPP is still used in one form or another all over the world, it is also the case that student
^ eX osed to many other techniques and procedures. PPP is a kind of ESA, as we saw b
there are many other lesson sequences, too, such the Boomerang and Patchwork sequences
mentioned above.

A4 Four methods ,
Four methods, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, are often considered together, wnu ,
individually, they are rarely used exclusively in 'mainstream' teaching, in different ways their
influence is still felt today.
In the classic form of Community Language Learning, a 'knower' stands outside a circle
of students and helps the students say what they want to say by translating, suggesting or
amending the students' utterances. The students' utterances may then be recorded so that
they can be analysed at a later date. Students, with the teacher's help, reflect on how they felt
about the activities.
Suggestopaedia was developed by Georgi Lozanov and is concerned above all with the physical
environment in which the learning takes place. Students need to be comfortable and relaxed so
that their affective filter is lowered. Students take on different names and exist in a child-paren
relationship with the teacher (Lozanov calls this'infantilisation'). Traumatic topics are avoided,
and at one stage of a three-part procedure, the teacher reads a previously-studied dialogue to
the accompaniment of music (preferably Baroque). During this phase there are also 'several
minutes of solemn silence' (Lozanov 1978:272) and the students leave the room silently.
A typical Total Physical Response (TPR) lesson might involve the teacher telling students
to 'pick up the triangle from the table and give it to me' or 'walk quickly to the door and hit
it' (Asher 1977: 54-56). When the students can all respond to commands correctly, one of
them can then start giving instructions to other classmates. James Asher believed that since
children learn a lot of their language from commands directed at them, second-language
learners can benefit from this, too. Crucially, in TPR students don't have to give instructions
themselves until they are ready.
One of the most notable features of the Silent Way is the behaviour of the teacher who,
rather than entering into conversation with the students, says as little as possible. This is
because the founder of the method, Caleb Gattegno, believed that learning is best facilitated if
the learner discovers and creates language rather than just remembering and repeating what
has been taught. The learner should be in the driving seat, in other words, not the teacher.
In the Silent Way, the teacher frequently points to different sounds on a phonemic chart,
modelling them before indicating that students should say the sounds. The teacher is then
silent, mdicatmg only by gesture or action when individual students should speak (they keep
trying to work out whether they are saying the sound correctly) and then showing when
sounds and words are said correctly by moving on to the next item. Because of the teacher's
silent non-mvolvement, it is up to the students - under the controlling but indirect influence
Pr0bkmS l e a f n t h e kn ua e T ica
IdentTt ~r ^ S S - y P % the Silent Way also gets
S (W den M0Cks f different col
1 s t T * "* " f °° ° ° ™ and sizes, see page 180)
to solve communication problems.
 POPULAR METHODOLOGY

To some, the Silent Way has seemed somewhat inhuman, with the teacher's silence acting
as a barrier rather than an incentive. But to others, the reliance students are forced to place
upon themselves and upon each other is exciting and liberating. It is students who should
take responsibility for their learning; it is the teacher's job to organise this.
Some of the procedures employed in these four methods may strike us as being (or having been)
outside the mainstream of classroom practice, or even somewhat eccentric. Nevertheless, in
their own ways, they contain truths about successful language learning. Community Language
Learning, for example, reminds us that teachers are in classrooms to facilitate learning and to
help students with what they want to say. Suggestopaedia's insistence on lowering the affective
filter reminds us how important affect is in language learning. Nor is there any doubt about
the appropriacy of getting students to move around in lessons, as in TPR. For students with
a more kinaesthetic inclination (see page 89), this will be especially useful. Finally, getting
students to think about what they are learning and to rely on themselves matches our concern
for cognitive depth (see page 57), where close attention to language by individual students has
a beneficial effect on the learning process.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

The real problem when attempting to define CLT (or the Communicative approach as it was
originally called) is that it means different things to different people. Or perhaps it is like
an extended family of different approaches, and '...as is the case with most families, not all
members live harmoniously together all of the time. There are squabbles and disagreements,
if not outright wars, from time to time. However, no one is willing to assert that they do not
belong to the family' (Nunan 2004: 7).
One of the things that CLT embraces within its family is the concept of how language is
used. Instead of concentrating solely on grammar, pioneers such as David Wilkins in the
1970s looked at what notions language expressed and what communicative functions people
performed with language (Wilkins 1976). The concern was with spoken functions as much as
with written grammar, and notions of when and how it was appropriate to say certain things
were of primary importance. Thus communicative language teachers taught people to invite
and apologise, to agree and disagree, alongside making sure they could use the past perfect or
the second conditional.
A major strand of CLT centres around the essential belief that if students are involved in
meaning-focused communicative tasks, then 'language learning will take care of itself (see
page 52), and that plentiful exposure to language in use and plenty of opportunities to use
it are vitally important for a student's development of knowledge and skill. Activities in CLT
typically involve students in real or realistic communication, where the successful achievement
of the communicative task they are performing is at least as important as the accuracy of their
language use. Thus role-play and simulation have become very popular in CLT. For example,
students might simulate a television programme or a scene at an airport - or they might put
together the simulated front page of a newspaper. In other communicative activities, students
have to solve a puzzle and can only do so by sharing information. Sometimes they have to
write a poem or construct a story together.
In order for these activities to be truly communicative, it was suggested from the very
beginning, students should have a desire to communicate something. They should have a
69
CHAPTER 4

p u r p ose
for communicating (e.g. to make a point, to buy a n a ^ - d « « ^ ^
a newspaper). They should be focused on the content of what t h e a n W ^ h e r than just
f
than on a particular language form. They should use a ^ ° ^ ^ ^ materials
one language structure. The teacher wnl not intervene to stop the * ™ ^ a n d t
he or she relies on will not dictate what specific language forms the students _u*e
other words, such activities should attempt to replicate real commumcaUon. AU this is
as being in marked contrast to the kind of teaching and learning we saw in At above, ney
at opposite ends of a 'communication continuum' as shown in Figure 5.
* *

Non-communicative activities Communicative

no communicative desire • a desire to communicate

• a communicative purpose
no communicative purpose
form not content ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ • content not form
one language item only | ^ | • variety of language
teacher intervention no teacher intervention
materials control no materials control
FIGURE 5: The communication continuum

Not all activities in CLT occur at either extreme of the continuum, however. Some may be
further towards the communicative end, whereas some may be more non-communicative.
activity in which students have to go round the class asking questions with a communicativ
purpose, but using certain prescribed structures (e.g. Have you ever done a bungee jump. tiav
you ever climbed a mountain? Have you ever been white-water rafting?) may be edging towar
the non-communicative end of the continuum, whereas another, where students have to
interview each other about a holiday they went on, might be nearer the communicative end.
A key to the enhancement of communicative purpose and the desire to communicate is
the information gap. A traditional classroom exchange in which one student asks Where s the
library? and another student answers It's on Green Street, opposite the bank when they can both
see it and both know the answer, is not much like real communication. If, however, the first
student has a map which does not have the library shown on it, while the other student has a
different map with library written on the correct building - but which the first student cannot
see - then there is a gap between the knowledge which the two participants have. In order for the
first student to locate the library on their map, that information gap needs to be closed.
CLT, therefore, with its different strands of what to teach (utterances as well as sentences,
functions as well as grammar) and how to teach it (meaning-focused communicative tasks
as well as more traditional study techniques), has become a generalised 'umbrella' term to
describe learning sequences which aim to improve the students' ability to communicate. This
is in stark contrast to teaching which is aimed more at learning bits of language just because
they exist - without focusing on their use in communication.
HoweverXLThascomeunderattackforbeingprejudicedinfavourofnative-speakerteachers
by demanding a relatively uncontrolled range of language use on the part of the student, and
thus expectmg the teacher to be able to respond to any and every language problem which may
come up (Medgyes 1992). In promoting a methodology which is based around group- and
pairwork, with teacher intervention kept to a minimum during, say, a role-play, CLT may also
 POPULAR METHODOLOGY

offend against educational traditions which rely on a more teacher-centred approach. CLT has
sometimes been seen as having eroded the explicit teaching of grammar with a consequent loss
among students of accuracy in the pursuit of fluency. Perhaps there is a danger in 'a general
over-emphasis on performance at the expense of progress' (Wicksteed 1998: 3). Finally, some
commentators suggest that many so-called communicative activities are no more or less real
than traditional exercises. Getting people to write a letter, buy an airline ticket, find out train
times (see Prabhu, quoted below), or go and look something up (see Allwright's study on page
52), is just as contrived as many more traditional exercises, and does not, in fact, arise from any
genuine communicative purpose.
Despite these reservations, however, the Communicative approach has left an indelible
mark on teaching and learning, resulting in the use of communicative activities in classrooms
all over the world.

Task-based learning (TBL)

Task-based learning (sometimes referred to as Task-based instruction, or TBI) makes the
performance of meaningful tasks central to the learning process. It is informed by a belief that
if students are focused on the completion of a task, they are just as likely to learn language as
they are if they are focusing on language forms. Instead of a language structure or function to
be learnt, students are presented with a task they have to perform or a problem they have to
solve. For example, in an early example of TBL, after a class performs some pre-task activities
which involve questions and vocabulary checking (e.g. What is this? It's a timetable. What
does 'arrival' mean?), they ask and answer questions to solve a problem, such as finding train-
timetable information, e.g. When does the Brindavan express leave Madras/arrive in Bangalore?
(Prahbu 1987:32). Although the present simple may frequently be used in such an activity, the
focus of the lesson is the task, not the structure.
One way of looking at Task-based learning is to see
it as a kind of'deep-end' strategy (see Johnson 1982), Pre-task
or, in the words of Jane Willis, 'like a sort of PPP upside Introduction to
down' (Willis 1994: 19). In other words, students are topic and task
given a task to perform and only when the task has Task cycle
been completed does the teacher discuss the language Task
that was used, making corrections and adjustments Planning
which the students' performance of the task has shown Report
to be desirable. This is similar to the Boomerang Language focus
procedure we mentioned on page 67. However, as Analysis
Willis herself makes clear, task-based methodology is, Practice
in fact, considerably more complicated than this. She
suggests three basic stages: the Pre-task, the Task cycle FIGURE 6: The Willis TBL framework
and the Language focus (see Figure 6). (Willis 1996: 52)
In the Pre-task stage, the teacher explores the topic with the class and may highlight useful
words and phrases, helping students to understand the task instructions. The students may
hear a recording of other people doing the same task. During the Task cycle stage, the students
perform the task in pairs or small groups while the teacher monitors from a distance. The
students then plan how they will tell the rest of the class what they did and how it went, and

71
CHAPTER 4

,hey then report on the , a * either orally or in writing, » " « — ^ r a « of

h Jpened. In the Language focus stage, the ^ « T ^ X » * « ™»
any listening or reading text which they have looked at for the a s k * n o r
conduct some form of practice of specific language features ^ J £ £ % Z a ! > P»obia
One of the examples that Jane Willis gives of such a procedure concerns a woma p
about spiders (Willi *# * H * ) . The woman lived with her h u s b a n d u couid never *
left alone because of her fear of spiders. Part of the procedure (which 1 have shorten
1 * 1 . 1 <

slightly amended) goes like this:

Pre-task: The teacher explains the woman's situation and asks students,
in pairs, to brainstorm three consecutive steps they might take to help
cure the woman of her phobia.
Task: Pairs list possible ways to help the woman get over her phobia.
Planning: Pairs rehearse how to explain the steps they recommend, and
justify the order they are in.
Report and reading: The pairs tell the class their proposals and justify
them. The class listen and count how many ideas they come up with.
The teacher lets the class decide and vote on which three steps might
be similar to those in a newspaper report about the phobic woman s
dilemma. She writes these on the board.
The teacher gives out the text. She asks students to read to see whether
their three steps were in the report. Finally, she asks which pair had the
most steps that were similar.

Language focus: The teacher helps students with any mistakes she heard
during the task. She then directs students back to the article and they
analyse it for topic vocabulary, time expressions, syntax elements, etc

Another kind of task might be to ask students to give a short presentation on the life ot
a famous historical figure of their choice. We could start by getting them to look at some
examples of brief biographies (on the Internet, for example) before discussing what is in such
biographies and how we might change the sequence of the information if we were going to
tell people about our figure. In pairs or groups, students now choose a figure and plan their
presentation. They might consult language books or ask us to help them with grammar and
vocabulary. They then give their presentations and subsequently we and they analyse what
they have said and work with language items that need attention. When all that is over, we
might get them to re-plan and re-deliver their presentations in order to take advantage of
what they learnt from the feedback on their first attempts (see 'The importance of repetition
on page 56}.
David Nunan s task sequence is somewhat different (Nunan 2004: Chapter 2). He starts with
the same kind of pre-task to build the students' schema (see page 271), but he then gives students
controlled language practice for the vocabulary they might need for their task. They then listen
to nauve speakers performing a similar task and analyse the language that was used. Finally,
 POPULAR METHODOLOGY

after some free practice of language, they reach the pedagogical task where they discuss issues
and make a decision. This is not at all like 'PPP upside down' since language focus activities lead
towards a task rather than occurring as a result of it. This, Nunan suggests, is because 'learners
should be encouraged to move from reproductive to creative language use' (2004:37).
There is some confusion, then, about what Task-based learning means. In one view, tasks
are the building blocks of a language course. Students perform the tasks and focus on language
form as they do the tasks, or as a result of having done them. In another version, however,
tasks are still the building blocks of the course, but we will provide students with the language
to do them before they set out to perform these tasks. It is the first of these two approaches
to TBL that is essentially based on the belief that 'get performance right and competence will,
with some prompting, take care of itself (Widdowson 2003:18).
Dave and Jane Willis are quite clear that despite different approaches to TBL (see above), its
advocates 'have rejected a reliance on presentation methodology' and that further 'the basis
for language development is the learner's attempt to deploy language for meaning' (Willis
and Willis 2003: 2).
Critics of TBL have raised a number of concerns about its overall applicability. William Littlewood,
for example, has difficulty, as we have done above, in pinning down exactiy what it means and so
wishes to abandon the term altogether (Littlewood 2004a). Paul Seedhouse suggests that while it
may be highly appropriate to base some learning on tasks, it would be 'unsound' to make tasks
'the basis for an entire pedagogical methodology' (Seedhouse 1999:155). He points out that the
kind of interaction which typical tasks promote leads to the use of specific 'task-solving' linguistic
forms. These fail to include the kind of language we might expect from discussion, debate or social
interactions of other kinds. As we saw on page 60, Guy Cook thinks that there is more to language
learning than just 'work' language; it is one of his main arguments for the inclusion of language
play. Michael Swan worries that 'while TBI may successfully develop learners' command of what
is known, it is considerably less effective for the systematic teaching of new language' (2005b: 376).
He also worries about how appropriate tasks are in a situation where teachers have little time,
and this point is taken up by Penny Ur. Working in a state school with only three or four English
lessons a week, she has to 'make sure they learn the most common and useful words and chunks
as fast as possible. We don't have time to wait until such items are encountered in communicative
tasks' (2006). However, as someone who wrote a book on 'task-centred discussions' (Ur 1981), she
does not argue that there is no place for communicative tasks, but rather that they are a 'necessary
added component of a structured, language-based syllabus and methodology' (2006:3).
Finally, a central claim of TBL is that 'opportunities for production may force students to
pay close attention to form and to the relationship between form and meaning' (Beglar and
Hunt 2002: 97), although Rob Batstone wonders whether tasks which require simultaneous
processing of form and meaning might 'overload the learner's system, leading to less intake
rather than more' (1996: 273).
Perhaps Task-based learning, like Communicative Language Teaching before it, is really a
family of slightly argumentative members who, despite their differences, really want to stay
together. In its pure form (that a curriculum should be based on tasks, and that learning
should emerge from the tasks rather than preceding them), it accurately reflects an approach
to learning exemplified by proponents of focus-on-form, rather than those who base their
curriculum on teaching a sequence of pre-selected forms. But the claims made for it, while

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