Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente

[pic 1]	UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA CENTRO DE COMUNICAÇÃO E EXPRESSÃO Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente PGI 410098 - Teoria e Descrição Linguística	[pic 2]
Student: Joseline Caramelo Afonso (201300502) Professor: Malcolm Coulthard The teaching of grammar and the task-based approach

Language teaching, for many years, was associated with grammar teaching (Nassaji and Fotos, 2011). In this sense, it was believed that knowing grammatical rules was enough for learners to acquire a new language. With the advent of the Communicative Language Teaching, grammar began to lose its focus within the classroom, and even became somewhat undesirable. The teaching of grammatical rules was discouraged, and “researchers even claimed that teaching grammar had little impact on learners’ grammatical development and did not lead to the development of communicative competence” (Nassaji and Fotos, 2011, p. vi). However, recent research on the field has shown that grammar plays an important role in second language classrooms, and that “form-focused instruction is especially effective when it is incorporated into a meaningful  communicative context” (Nassaji and Fotos, 2011, p. vii).

The assumption in traditional approaches to grammar instruction - such as the grammar translation and audio-lingual methods - was that learning the structure of a foreign language was a major problem and, due to that, it should receive undivided attention. The grammar translation method, for instance, focused on the explicit teaching of grammatical rules and the written skill, and students translated texts from the target language (L2) to the their L1^[1]. Towards the beginning of the 20th century and the advent of World War II, the need for fluency and oral skills in foreign languages became paramount, and the audio-lingual method emerged. Within this context, learners would still be focused on learning the grammatical structures, but unlike the grammar translation method, these structures were acquired through the memorization of grammatical patterns. “It was believed that such memorization formed and reinforced language habits” (Nassaji and Fotos, 2011, p. 3). Therefore, the lessons within the audio-lingual method used many examples and repetitions of grammatical rules, and those were taught inductively, as opposed to the explicit teaching in the grammar translation method.

Other grammar based approaches emerged after the ones previously mentioned; however, it is important to point out that the development and emergence of methods was based on context and necessity of language use within that specific setting. In this sense, a necessity for an approach which encompassed real-life communication, and a focus on meaning and language use shifted the teaching method away from the focus on language forms alone (Nassaji and Fotos, 2011), and the communicative language approach appeared.

It was within the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and second language acquisition (SLA) research that the task-based instruction originated. According to Mackey (2006), the CLT focuses on the teaching of all four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), in which learner participation is of utmost importance, meaning is paramount, and the main goal is communicative competence (Finocchiaro & Brumfit, 1983, as cited in Brown, 2001). In this context, teachers create “learning situations in which students can engage in purposeful communication” (Mackey, 2006, p.456) through the use of communicative activities. These communicative activities were highly discussed among SLA researchers in the 1970s and 1980s (Skehan, 2003). During that time, the terms ‘communicative activity’ and ‘task’ were being used interchangeably, and the task-based approach emerged.

Taking into account that tasks have been playing a central role within the fields of SLA and language pedagogy (Ellis, 2003), a growing number of professionals in the field have began to implement tasks as a way to bring about communication and elicit language use from the learners. Therefore, the task-based approach “has become a cornerstone of many educational institutions and ministry of education around the world.” (Nunan, 2004, p.13)

According to Skehan (2003), the term ‘task’ was initially related to the “necessity and sufficiency of input” (Krashen, 1985, as cited in Skehan, 2003, p. 1). Later, it was argued interaction was also crucial (Long, 1983, 1985a, as cited in Skehan, 2003), given it provided feedback for the students, and also promoted “indices for the negotiation of meaning, such as comprehension checks, clarification requests, and confirmation checks, all regarded by one group of researchers as key indices of interactions in progress which would be supportive of acquisition.” (Skehan, 2003, p. 2). However, later studies (Doughty & Varela, 1998; Doughty & Williams, 1998; Long, Inagaki & Ortega, 1998; Skehan, 1998; Robinson, 2001; and Swain & Lapkin, 2001, as cited in Skehan, 2003) showed that interaction alone was not enough, and a focus on form was necessary.

Task-based instruction^[2], therefore, would view “the learning process as a set of communicative tasks that are directly linked to the curricular goals they serve, the purposes of which extend beyond the practice of language for its own sake” (Brown, 2001, p. 50). However, as stated by Ellis (2003), there is no consesus as to what a task is, which makes definitions somewhat problematic. Nonetheless, as Ellis points out, all definitions address the following dimensions: (a) the scope of a task, (b) the perspective from which a task is viewed, (c) the authenticity of a task, (d) the linguistic skills required to perform a task, (e) the psychological processes involved in task performance, and (f) the outcome of a task.

Some researchers provide broad definitions, such as Long’s (1985, as cited in Ellis, 2003), which include both tasks that require the use of language (making a hotel reservation) and the ones that do not (painting a fence). In this sense, “by ‘taks’ is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between” (Long, 1985, as cited in Ellis, 2003, p. 4). On the other hand, more narrow definitions see tasks as activities which require the use of language, such as that of Nunan (1989, as cited in Ellis, 2003), “a task is a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing, or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form” (p. 4).