Task

Task-Based Learning
A traditional model for the organisation of language lessons, both in the classroom and in
course-books, has long been the PPP approach (presentation, practice, production).With
this model individual language items (for example, the past continuous) are presented by the
teacher, then practiced in the form of spoken and written exercises (often pattern drills), andthen used by the learners in less controlled speaking or writing activities. Although the
grammar point presented at the beginning of this procedure may well fit neatly into a
grammaticalsyllabus, a frequent criticism of this approach is the apparent arbitrariness of the
selected grammar point, which may or may not meet the linguistic needs of the learners, and
the fact that theproduction stage is often based on a rather inauthentic emphasis on the
chosen structure.
An alternative to the PPP model is the Test-Teach-Test approach (TTT), in which the
production stage comes firstand the learners are "thrown in at the deep end" and required to
perform a particular task (a role play, for example). This is followed by the teacher dealing
with some of the grammatical orlexical problems that arose in the first stage and the learners
then being required either to perform the initial task again or to perform a similar task. The
language presented in the ‘teach’ stagecan be predicted if the initial production task is
carefully chosen but there is a danger of randomness in this model.
Jane Willis (1996), in her book ‘A Framework for Task-Based Learning’, outlines athird
model for organizing lessons. While this is not a radical departure from TTT, it does present a
model that is based on sound theoretical foundations and one which takes account of theneed for authentic communication. Task-based learning (TBL) is typically based on three
stages. The first of these is the pre-task stage, during which the teacher introduces and
defines the topic...