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