English Language Teaching in its Social Context

162 PAUL KNIGHT6 Raman goes to see his uncle in K. K. Nagar every Sunday. Can he use his tokens togo to K. K. Nagar? How do you know?Task Balan studies at the Higher Secondary School in Nungambakkam. His home is inAdyar. He has classes only in the afternoons, from Monday to Saturday.There are directbuses from Nungambakkam to Adyar and a ticket costs one rupee.1 How many tokens does Balan need each month?2 How many tokens should he buy each month? How much money does he save?3 He bought 60 tokens in July. His school had some holidays in August, so he usedonly 30 tokens up to 15 August.a Can he go on using the remaining 30 tokens? How do you know?b Can he return the remaining 30 tokens and get back the money? How can youtell?Figure 8.4 A typical Prabhu taskHaving used Long’s and Crookes’ analysis ofTBL, we now come to the model that theypropose, known as task-based language teaching (TBLT) .They argue that this model is soundlybased on SLA research, on classroom-centred research and on principles of syllabus andcourse design (Long and Crookes 1992: 41). A distinctive feature of this model is that itencourages a ‘focus on form’. This is not a traditional structural syllabus approach, but anacknowledgement that acquisition can be accelerated if learners’ attention is drawn to specificlinguistic features of the target language (Long 1991). In developing the model ofTBLTfurther, Long has outlined those features which should characterise a ‘task’ and attemptedto provide a solid theoretical framework for an approach based on them (Long 1996, et al.).However, there are still questionsTBLT needs to address. Long and Crookes acknowledgethis when they compare it to otherTBL approaches (Long and Crookes 1992: 46). Itsresearch base is still small and no complete programmes have yet been undertaken to accessit. The question of sequencing tasks is still an issue, as is the question of producing ataxonomy of tasks. Finally, the degree of reduced learner autonomy could invite criticism.Long and Crookes’ model has also never actually been realised in terms of materialsdevelopment or classroom practice, in contrast to Prabhu’s model or Breen and Candlin’s.Overal1,TBL looks like a very exciting area and one which is already strongly influencingthinking in the field of language teaching methodology. It is not just limited to those modelsdescribed here; other models are being proposed and specific questions of task definitionand design are also being examined (Skehan 1996, 1998; Nunan 1989, etc.).Text-based teachingAnother new post-CLT approach to language teaching has been text-based teaching (alsoknown as genre-based). Unlike TBL, which we saw is based on a model of learning, textbasedlearning grew out of a model of language, namely Systemic-Functional Grammar. Itis an approach which has been summarised in the following observation:Language occurs as whole texts which are embedded in the social contexts in whichthey are used.People learn language through working with whole texts. (Feez 1998)