Chapter 7. Task-based teaching and assessment

Dissatisfaction with conventional linguistically-based syllabuses, along with a growing understanding from research findings of how people learn second (including foreign) languages, has led since the 1980s to a number of proposals for various kinds of task-based alternatives. Examples include the procedural syllabus (Prabhu, 1987), the process syllabus (Breen, 1984), and the task syllabus (Long, 1985; Nunan, 1991; Robinson, in press; Skehan, 1998). In addition, there has been advocacy of ‘task-based’ approaches which in reality adhere to a linguistic syllabus of some kind, usually grammatical and/or lexical (see, e.g., Ellis, 1993), even if covert, as where tasks are employed in order to teach specific structures (e.g., Loschky & Bley-Vroman, 1993).