M. Long: Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching.

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, the field of second language acquisition (SLA) has witnessed a rapidly growing interest in the role of instruction, particularly focusing on task-based learning and teaching. Accordingly, there is a plethora of research on task-based language teaching (TBLT), not all of which has necessarily implemented what Long presents in this book as ‘genuine’ TBLT. In 1985, Long explained that by ‘task’, he ‘… meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between. “Tasks” are the things people will tell you they do if you ask them and they are not applied linguists’ (p. 89). In language pedagogy, ‘task’ is the unit of analysis throughout the course design, implementation, and evaluation intended to meet the communicative needs of diverse groups of learners. However, many of what classroom practitioners, as well as researchers, call communicative tasks are in fact exercises or activities, which serve as a vehicle for practicing target linguistic forms in task- supported language teaching (LT). In the volume under review, on SLA and TBLT, Long uses orthography to distinguish between ‘genuine’ TBLT, of which he is an adamant advocate, and all other approaches to LT that utilize tasks (i.e. task-supported LT). ‘TBLT’, as an upper case abbreviation, is reserved for ‘genuine’ TBLT, which Long has been developing for three decades with fervor. Long’s TBLT model emphasizes that tasks involve learners in communicative language use, in which more attention is paid to meaning than to grammatical form. By contrast, in task-supported LT, tasks are used to implement a linguistic syllabus; hence, Long refers to them as ‘linguistically focused tasks’. Long’s clear explanation of this distinction is useful, because much confusion, not to mention critique, has arisen from other definitions of ‘task’ and misperceptions of the theoretical rationale underpinning TBLT.