The purpose of this chapter is to articulate some of the concerns and problems confronting those wishing to incorporate 'task' as a central element in syllabus planning and development. Within the field of language curriculum design, a traditional distinction is drawn between syllabus design and methodology. The former is concerned with the selection, justification and sequencing of linguistic and experiential content, while the latter is concerned with the selection, justification and sequencing of learning tasks and activities. However, with the development of communicative approaches to language teaching, this distinction has become difficult to sustain, as the 'what' and 'how' of the curriculum begin to merge (see, for example, Breen, 1984).

Incorporation of 'task' as a basic element in the design phase of the curriculum has created significant problems for grading and sequencing because of the number of factors involved, and the interaction between these factors. While a healthy research agenda has developed in recent years, the conceptual and empirical thrust of this research has been methodological in flavor, focusing on psycholinguistically motivated rationales for selecting and sequencing tasks. The dilemma for the syllabus designer, however, is on selecting and sequencing tasks which are not only psycholinguistically motivated, but which are also related in some principled fashion to the things which the learner might actually or potentially wish to do outside the classroom (see, for example, Long & Crookes, Chapter 1, this volume). The essential problem to be solved, then, is how to achieve a rational articulation in selecting, sequencing and integrating tasks so that the curriculum is more than an untidy 'rag-bag' of tasks which, while theoretically motivated in psycholinguistic terms, are unrelated to each other and disconnected from the learner.

In this chapter, I shall first provide a context for addressing this central problem by looking at the scope and changing nature of syllabus design. I shall also outline a framework for analysing tasks. The framework can be used to catalogue and summarize the task research agenda as it has emerged thus far. Finally, I shall present a planning grid for use in task-based syllabus design, a grid which can facilitate the process of developing principled links between the target tasks which learners need to perform beyond the classroom, but which also incorporates what is known about 'good' language learning tasks.

However, with the development of communicative approaches to language teaching, it has become apparent that this traditional distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Breen (1984) highlights the dilemma but points out that embracing communicative views of language learning and teaching forces us to consider both the destination and the route of learning, that we learn to communicate by communicating. Communicative language learning and teaching has forced a radical rethinking of key curriculum questions. These questions relate to the traditional domains of syllabus design (what?, why? and when?), methodology (how?), and assessment (how well?).

Answering the 'what' and 'why' questions requires the syllabus designer to justify input. When syllabuses are defined largely in terms of linguistic content, the answer is usually in linguistic terms. However, when content is defined in terms of communicative tasks of one sort or another, the answers are more likely to be made with reference to the learner or with reference to psycholinguistic processes of acquisition. Answering 'what' and 'why' questions with reference to the learner leads us towards needs analysis and the specification of target language performance and will result in a methodology predicated on learning as rehearsal. In other words, class time will be largely devoted to tasks in which learners rehearse those communicative behaviors which they wish or need to carry out outside the classroom. A psycholinguistic rationale will result in classroom tasks which attempt to replicate those conditions which, it is hypothesized, will facilitate as yet little understood psycholinguistic processes of acquisition. (It could be argued that a comprehensive curriculum would fulfil both pragmatic and psycholinguistic conditions along the lines suggested, for example, by Long, 1985.) or a detailed discussion on the various points of departure for syllabus design, see Nunan (1988a, 1989).

The changing scope and nature of curriculum development brought about by communicative views of language learning and teaching are illustrated in Figure 1.

From Figure 1, it can be seen that the development of communicative approaches to language teaching has had a major impact on curriculum processes as well as outcomes. In the first place, much more information about and, desirably, from learners needs to be taken into consideration. Secondly, it is worth noting the priority of tasks over linguistic content (that is, grammar, lexis and phonology). In the traditional model, classroom tasks and exercises are selected with reference to the prior selection of linguistic content. With communicative models, tasks are selected first, and the linguistic elements are selected with reference to these.

There is, as has already been mentioned, a growing body of research which can assist the syllabus designer to make informed decisions relating to the selection and grading of tasks on psycholinguistic grounds. This research can be summarized using the framework for analyzing tasks which is set out in the following section.

If we look in the literature, we shall see that task is variously defined. Here are some examples:

... a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some reward. Thus, examples of tasks include painting a fence, dressing a child, filling out a form, buying a pair of shoes, making an airline reservation, borrowing a library book, taking a driving test, typing a letter, weighing a patient, sorting letters, taking a hotel reservation, writing a cheque, finding a street destination and helping someone across a road. In other words, by 'task' is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between. (Long, 1985: 89)

This is a non-pedagogical definition in that it describes the sorts of things individuals do with language outside the classroom, and is the sort of characterization which might be offered by a learner if asked why he/she is learning the language. From a language teaching perspective, it is worth noting that some of the tasks need not necessarily involve the use of language. There is also the problem of knowing where one task ends and another begins. (I should point out that this is a problem shared by all approaches to task-based learning.)

Richards, Platt & Weber offer a more pedagogically oriented definition. They suggest that a task is:

an activity or action which is carried out as the result of processing or understanding language (i.e. as a response). For example, drawing a map while listening to a tape, listening to an instruction and performing a command, may be referred to as tasks. Tasks may or may not involve the production of language. A task usually requires the teacher to specify what will be regarded as successful completion of the task. The use of a variety of different kinds of tasks in language teaching is said to make teaching more communicative . . . since it provides a purpose for a classroom activity which goes beyond the practice of language for its own sake. (Richards, Platt & Weber, 1985: 289)

Despite their differences, these definitions have a common characteristic; they both suggest that tasks are concerned with communicative language. In other words, they refer to undertakings in which learners comprehend, produce and interact in the target language in contexts in which they are focused on meaning rather than form. Following these characterizations, I shall define the communicative task as 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. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right. The notion of 'completeness' is admittedly rather problematic, representing a continuum rather than a polar opposite. Additionally, when tasks are implemented in the classroom an observer's or participant's judgment will determine the degree of completeness as much as the characteristics of the task itself.

Minimally, a task will consist of some input data and one or more elated activities or procedures. Input refers to the data that learners are to work on: it may be linguistic (e.g. a radio broadcast), non-linguistic (e.g. a set of photographs), or 'hybrid' (e.g. a road map). In addition, tasks will have, either explicitly or implicitly (and in most cases these are implicit) goals, roles of teachers and learners and a setting. This relatively simple scheme provides a useful framework for summarizing research on tasks.

As we have already seen, major tasks for curriculum designers include the selection, grading and sequencing of linguistic content and pedagogic tasks. Initial selection is carried out with reference to the target goals of the learners and also with reference to theories of learning. Grading and sequencing are carried out with reference to priority of learner needs and also with reference to notions of difficulty. Determining difficulty is a major problem because of the number of factors involved (factors relating to any of the task elements as set out in Figure I may have an impact on difficulty). In addition, these factors interact. Some of the relevant research on task difficulty is set out in Table 1.

Brindley (1984): goals which reflect the communicative needs of learners have greater face validity.

Porter & Roberts (1981): Aural texts written specifically for English language teaching differ significantly in their linguistic characteristics from genuine spoken discourse.

Brown & Yule (1983): The difficulty of listening texts is determined by: (a) the number of elements and the ease/difficulty of distinguishing between them and (b) text genre: descriptions are easier than instructions which are easier than stories which are easier than arguments or opinion-expressing texts.

Nunan (1985): Content familiarity is more significant than grammatical complexity in determining the difficulty of reading texts.

Morris & Stewart-Dore (1984): Input texts from different subject areas have their own distinctive generic structure.

Anderson & Lynch (1988): The difficulty of listening texts is determined by: information organization; familiarity of topic; explicitness and sufficiency of information; referring expressions (e.g. for young children pronominal referents are more difficult than full NP referents); text type.

Long (1981): Two-way tasks prompt significantly more conversational adjustments than one-way tasks.

Brown & Yule (1983): The length of the speaking turn is a factor in the difficulty of speaking tasks.

Willing (1988): Learners' activity preferences can vary markedly, and are determined by cognitive style and personality variables.

Brock (1986): Use of referential questions prompts significantly longer and more syntactically complex responses containing more connectives.

Doughty & Pica (1986): Required information exchange tasks generate significantly more interactional modifications than optional information exchange tasks.

Duff (1986): Convergent (e.g. problem solving) tasks produce more negotiation of meaning than divergent (e.g. debating) tasks.

Long & Crookes (1986): Use of referential questions results in greater mastery of experiential content.

Nunan (1987): Use of referential questions prompts more negotiation of meaning and syntactically and discoursally more complex language.

Nunan (1988b; 1988c): There are often dramatic mismatches between the activity preferences of teachers and students.

Prabhu (1987): Difficulty is determined by the amount and type of information provided, the number of steps of cognitive operations, the degree of precision called for, learners' knowledge of the world and the degree of abstractness (e.g. working with concepts is more difficult than working with objects or actions).

Bruton & Samuda (1980): Learners are capable of correcting each other successfully.

Porter (1983): Learners produce more talk with other learners than with native speaking partners.

Porter (1983): Learners do not produce more errors when speaking with other learners.

Varonis & Gass (1985): Most negotiation of meaning occurs when learners are from different language backgrounds and different proficiency levels.

Wright (1987): There are two dimensions to learners' roles when carrying out classroom tasks: task-related activity or interactivity and interpersonal activity or interpersonality.

Long, Adams, McLean & Castafias (1976): Small group tasks prompt students to use a greater range of language functions than teacher-fronted tasks.

Montgomery & Eisenstein (1985): Community-based learning experiences resulted in significantly increased language gains (including mastery of grammar) than classroom-based learning.

Doughty & Pica (1986): Small group tasks generate significantly more interactional modifications than teacher- fronted tasks.

Anderson & Boyle cited in Anderson & Lynch (1988): Success on listening tasks is significantly better when done in small groups than individually.

This summary of relevant research is illustrative rather than exhaustive. It serves to demonstrate the extensive body of literature to which syllabus designers can refer in selecting and sequencing tasks.

Tasks with a real-world rationale require learners to approximate, in class, the sorts of tasks required of them in the world beyond the classroom. (The term 'real-world' is used here as a form of shorthand. It is not suggested that the classroom is not 'real'.) Tasks with a pedagogic rationale, on the other hand, require learners to do things which it is extremely unlikely they would be called upon to do outside the classroom ... while the selection of real-world tasks (as we shall call tasks with a real-world rationale) will proceed with reference to some form of needs analysis, pedagogic tasks will be selected with reference to some theory or model of second language acquisition. (Nunan, 1989: 40-1)

Dispute over the relative merits of needs driven and SLA driven tasks has found expression in the literature, as is evidenced in the following quotes:

Classroom activities should parallel the 'real world' as closely as possible. Since language is a tool of communication, methods and materials should concentrate on the message, not the medium. (Clarke & Silberstein, 1977: 51)

. . . what is wanted is a methodology which will . . . provide for communicative competence by functional investment. [Such a methodology] would engage the learners in problem-solving tasks as purposeful activities but without the rehearsal requirement that they should be realistic or 'authentic' as natural social behaviour. (Widdowson,1987:71)

Long (1985: 89) comes out strongly in favor of referencing tasks against the real world. He proposes the following four stage procedure in developing language programs:

He goes on to say that, 'If "task" will serve in all these capacities, it should provide the basis for naturally compatible decisions at all stages in programme design and implementation'. (See also Long & Crookes, Chapter 1 this volume.)

At the present time, what is needed is a means whereby the notions of rehearsal and functional investment (see Widdowson, 1987) might be brought together. Desirably, tasks should (1) be systematically linked to the things learners need to do in the real world, (2) incorporate what we know about the nature of successful communication, and (3) embody what we know about second language acquisition.

Bygate (1987) outlines one way in which this might be achieved. He suggests that oral interactions can be characterized in terms of routines. Routines are conventional (and therefore predictable) ways of presenting information which can focus on either information or interaction. Information routines contain frequently recurring types of information structures. These can be either expository (e.g. narration, description, instruction, comparison) or evaluative (e.g. explanation, justification, predication, decision). Interaction routines can be either service (e.g. a job interview) or social (e.g. a dinner party). A further feature of oral interaction is that the participants need constantly to negotiate meaning, and generally manage the interaction in terms of who is to say what, to whom, when and about what.

Of course, life does not proceed through sets of finite interactional routines. Any interaction may, in fact, contain elements of any or all of the various elements identified by Bygate. That is, any encounter will contain informational and interactional elements as well as the negotiation of meaning and management of interaction. An alternative representation of Bygate's scheme is set out in Table 2. Such a table could be used to provide a map or profile of a given interaction.

Frameworks such as these provide the syllabus designer with a way of integrating learners' real-world or target communicative needs with the sorts of rhetorical macrofunctions or genres (e.g. narratives, descriptions, instructions) which have been proposed by systemic functional linguists (Halliday, 1985). Systemics also provides a social perspective on interaction, and a number of researchers are now beginning to incorporate insights from systernics into their work on tasks. I cite as an example Berwick (1988; Chapter 4 this volume) who found that genre was a significant factor in the generation of negotiation and repair.

A major challenge, and point of controversy concerns the relationship between form and function. Systemic- functionalists argue that function determines form (see, for example, Halliday, 1985; Martin 1985). According to Halliday:

Every text - that is, everything that is said or written - unfolds in some context of use; furthermore, it is the uses of language that, over tens of thousands of generations, have shaped the system. Language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organised is functional with respect to those needs - it is not arbitrary. A functional grammar is essentially a 'natural' grammar, in the sense that everything in it can be explained, ultimately, by reference to how language is used. (Halliday, 1985: xiii)

. . . one can understand form independent of function; however function is not enough to understand form. When Kumpf (1984), for instance, asserts that 'any grammatical form appears to fill a function in the discourse: it is the discourse context which creates the conditions under which the forms appear, and in order to explain the forms, it is necessary to refer to this context', she is making a claim that is far too strong to be tenable. What for instance is the discourse function of grammatical gender, or third person singular -s, vowel harmony? (Gregg, 1989: 26)

Gregg also points out that such arguments confuse competence and performance, that context explains the appearance of a form but not its existence.

The claims made by systemic-functionalists on the relationship between genre and linguistic form would seem to be eminently amenable to empirical investigation. To exemplify: one such claim is that a report will require the use of generic referents, simple present, lack of temporal sequence, and use of 'being' and 'having' processes. If reports were to appear which were not realized through such linguistic forms, but which were nonetheless effective and recognizable as reports, the approach (I refrain from using the term 'theory') would be seriously undermined. However, even if such an eventuality were to occur, the weaker, probabalistic claim that in general 'reports' will be characterized by the aforesaid forms, but will not be determined by them, may still provide useful guidance to the syllabus developer who is concerned with the practical issues of design rather than the theoretical ones of model- building.

BERWICK, R. 1988, The effect of task variation in teacher-led groups on repair of English as a foreign language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia.

LONG, M. H. and CROOKES, G. 1986, Intervention points in second language classroom processes. Paper presented at the RELC Regional Seminar, Singapore, April.

PORTER, P. 1983, Variations in the conversations of adult learners of English as a function of the proficiency level of the participants. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Stanford University.

PORTER, D and ROBERTS, J. 1981, Authentic listening activities. EL T Journal 36, 37-47.

RICHARDS, J., PLATT, J. and WEBER, H. 1985, Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. London: Longman.

VARONIS, E. M. and GASS, S. 1985, Normative/normative conversations: A model for negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics 6, 71-90.