TERESA PICA

TASK-BASED INSTRUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Task-based instruction is characterized by activities that engage lan-

guage learners in meaningful, goal-oriented communication to solve
problems, complete projects, and reach decisions. Tasks have been used
for a broad range of instructional purposes, serving, for example, as units
of course syllabi, activities for structure or function practice, and lan-
guage focusing enhancements to content-based curricula. Although the
language used to carry out a task need not be prespecified, a task can
be designed so that attaining its goal depends on linguistic and commu-
nicative precision, or requires the use of specific grammatical forms
(e.g., Ellis, 2003; Loschky and Bley-Vroman, 1993). The communica-
tion strategies and learning processes that emerge during task goal
attainment are consistent with those advanced in second language acqui-
sition (SLA) theory and found in SLA research. Demands on the learn-
ers’ attention, comprehension, and production as they carry out a task
that can lead them to test L2 hypotheses, obtain feedback on their com-
prehensibility, draw inferences about L2 rules and features, and produce
more accurate and developmentally advanced output.

E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S

Early developments in task-based instruction reflect principles and

practices of communicative language teaching, many of which remain
in effect to date. A role for tasks was implicit in communicative lan-
guage teaching from its inception, revealed, for example, by Allwright
(1979), who described ways in which instructional activities could pro-
mote development of language for authentic use rather than knowledge
of language as an unapplied system. Most of the field of language edu-
cation looks to Prabhu’s work in Bangalore, India in the 1980s as the
first large-scale project to use tasks as the foundation for instruction
within a communicative curriculum (Beretta and Davies, 1985; Prabhu,
1987). Prabhu advanced the idea that task participation could facilitate
L2 structure learning without a need to focus on structures themselves,
as the need for task completion and goal attainment would create

N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and

Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 71–82.
#2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.