Balance between form and function

“A task is an activity which requires learners to use language, with emphasis on meaning, to attain an objective”

The definition provided by Skehan (p.3) seems to provide a lot of room for discussion. Or not. That is, it is too vague to enlighten the planning of specific activities, but it still helps teachers understand what kind of activities are not tasks. Also, it is clear by this definition that language is viewed from a functional-pragmatic perspective and not as system of rules that can be learned as more formal perspectives on languages do.

Considering this, it is hard not to think of Task-Based Language Teaching as a strand of Communicative Language Teaching that has come to understand the importance of explicitly addressing form in language learning processes. In order to use such an approach, one needs to understand the way language and society interact and how they are intrinsically connected. A functional perspective on language should not disregard the importance forms play in shaping the attainment of communicative objectives and the way cultures help shape the forms of the language. It is a two-way relationship. However, I believe that, in spite of the introduction of a Focus-on-Form component in Task-Based Language Teaching, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed in order to avoid the traps offered by the purest forms of CLT (how to create authentic communicative situations, how to make sure that learners can profit from quality input/intake in their interlanguage, how to respond to those students who privilege knowledge over communication, etc., how to make sure that fluency, accuracy and complexity of speech are all taken care of in the classroom, etc.).

I believe Task-Based Language Teaching addresses some of these issues. Activities as the ones described in chapter 9 do provide alternatives to bring genuine activities that require a lot of involvement on the part of the students in the classroom as well as in the ‘real world’. However, I do believe that aspects such as quality of input, intake, functional interaction (interaction that is useful for language learning purposes) and cultural issues still need to be studies in this approach. The authors of chapter 9 acknowledge this problem and I do believe that the research-oriented approaches to task presented by Skehan (psycholinguistic, sociocultural, cognitive and focused tasks) do provide us, teachers with a range of possibilities to go into our classroom, implement them and deepen the research on these issues. I believe that no final word can be reached, but I think that doing some action research with our student communities can help us understand what works best for us as teachers and for our student populations.