FOCUS ON FORM IN TBLT: RESTRICTING
OR EMPOWERING?
Dave Willis & Jane Willis
www.willis-elt.co.uk
Overview
• A bit of background
• Discussion
• Predictions about task language
• Language analysis: data from texts and spontaneous task recordings
• Implications
• TBLT in practice – short term and long term task sequences
????
Burma
Canada
China
Dubai
Egypt
Greece
Holland
Japan
Spain
Thailand
Turkey
USA
Other
… a conservative profession , out of touch
with language acquisition studies has for
many years transmitted essentially the
same view of how teaching should be
organised and what teachers should be like.
(Skehan 1998:94)
•The approach has an excellent
relationship with teacher training and
teachers’ feeling of professionalism.
•It lends itself very neatly to
accountability. (Testing; syllabus
design)
•There is no clear alternative.
(Skehan: 1998: 94)
It is … comfortable for teachers and teacher
educators, and for the writers and publishers of
teaching materials to maintain that there is a direct
relationship between teaching and learning. For
teachers and teacher educators this belief offers
security. It suggests that we know exactly what we
are doing and where we are going. We can plan
lessons and recommend methodologies with
confidence. For writers and publishers it means that
they can make clear, unqualified claims in terms of
teaching and learning for the materials they
produce. (D. Willis Forthcoming)
The desert island game:
If you were cast away on a desert island which four of the following items would you choose to take with you?
an axe; a gun; an English dictionary; a fifty metre length of rope; a month’s supply of tinned food; fifty boxes of matches; a dozen candles; a set of kitchen knives; a torch
Making suggestions:
One participant is asking for advice on travel and tourism in South-east Asia. The other participant has a lot of expertise in this area.
Daily routines:
Find out what time your partner has breakfast lunch and dinner each day. Do not ask any questions about meals, mealtimes or food.
If learners feel it necessary to use should all the time (for example at the production stage of a PPP cycle where should has been presented), they are confined to one wording and are missing out on experimenting with other ways of expressing a whole range of similar meanings. Learners may wish to express their meanings less forcefully than should suggests, so phrases like I would say or I would recommend or Well, what you could do is … would be more appropriate. In a PPP lesson learners are being unnaturally constrained when they should be experiencing the richness of meaning potential and practising normal conversational skills(Cox 2005:179)
The focus on grammar should vary according to the kind of grammatical system.
Grammatical systems
Structure:Clause and phrase structureInterrogative and negative formsRelative clauses.
Orientation:Tense, modality and aspectDeterminersInformation organisation
Pattern:Systematic frames in which words operatee.g. It + BE + ADJ. + to-infinitive the + NOUN + of + -ing
(Willis, D. 2003)
•We cannot teach the grammar of
orientation by explaining,
demonstrating or exemplifying.
•Learner dependence on teacher and
on prescriptive input is restricting.
•Declarative knowledge is inadequate
for orientation and pattern.
•We cannot rely on progression from
declarative to procedural knowledge.
Improvisation
Learning processes
Recognition
System-building
Exploration
ConsolidationSpontaneous
use
Empowering learners
When to work on language and focus on form?
Priming & Preparation Availability of key lexis & useful phrases
Task >> Planning >>>> Report of outcomeLanguage extension
>> Prestige language use
Form focusAnalysis & practice
of language features fromtexts written or spoken that learners have read or
heard
Why should learners bother to commit
themselves to grammatical complexity
in the classroom?
•Design and implementation of tasks
•Short term task sequences
•Task framework (task > planning > report)
•Data – recordings of tasks, task reports and task related texts
•Language analysis (Skehan: Language use and language learning. Johns and Davies (1983) ‘Text as a vehicle for information (TAVI) and ‘Text as a linguistic object’ (TALO)
•Long term task sequences – based on topic or possibly on systemic/semantic analysis
Discussion
A presentation based model is still the norm in the teaching profession. What can be done to convince teachers of the value of task-based approaches?
• Research?
• Training?
• Publications?
• Interaction with teachers?
www.willis-elt.co.uk