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Over the last few decades, research into second language acquisition (SLA) has been gaining more and more ground and has finally come to be fully accepted as a scientific field. New theories on learning and teaching, theories on motivation, theories on coding, storing and retrieving information, theories on learner and teacher personalities, types and roles have been developed and traditional approaches have been discarded to a certain extent. Instructed foreign language learning is no longer seen (as KRASHEN had still claimed in the 1980s) as relying on completely different mental processes than natural second language acquisition but these two possibilities to acquire/learn another language are today rather seen as having quite a lot in common.

In natural second language acquisition, i.e., when somebody acquires a new language by just “picking it up” from their surroundings, the focus is normally exclusively on communication, as one wants to understand and wants to be (and usually needs to be) understood as well. Since communicative language teaching approaches – and with them the focus on communication and communicative success – have taken centre stage, the notion of ‘communication’ has become the buzzword in seminars on foreign language teaching methodology and in teacher training as well as in curricula for all school types, and also in the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR). The CEFR even implicitly recommends task-based teaching when it states that the approach which is needed in foreign language classrooms “is an action-oriented one in so far as it views users and learners of a language primarily as ‘social agents’, i.e. members of society who have tasks (…) to accomplish (…) within a particular field of action” (COUNCIL OF EUROPE 2001: 9).

In contrast to the teacher-centred approaches such as Grammar-Translation and Audiolingualism, which were briefly outlined in the previous chapter, task-based language teaching can be seen as learner-centred and meaning-oriented and has its origins in communicative language teaching (CLT)1. NUNAN (2015: 10) even calls it “the methodological ‘realization’ of CLT”. However, it can be argued that this statement does not go far enough, because task-based language teaching normally goes (or should at least go) beyond what communicative language teaching has offered, as it focuses primarily on the learner instead of only on the communicative purpose of language. Furthermore, it highlights the idea of topically structured communication and not just of communication as such, because learners are presented with tasks on a specific topic and communicate among each other about the given topic.

In a sociocultural view of second language acquisition, communication (or rather interaction) is seen as the essence of learning, as described by R. ELLIS (2003: 177): “acquisition occurs in rather than as a result of interaction. From this perspective, then, L2 acquisition is not a purely individual-based process but shared between the individual and other persons”. As communication and interaction are the reasons why language exists, it does not exactly come as a surprise that language is acquired by learners while they are using it, either with the teacher or with other learners or later on in real-world situations. It is up to the teacher to select suitable tasks and topics, not only keeping the learners’ age level, motivation and interests in mind but also the usefulness of the elicited language for real-world communication, i.e., outside of the classroom. As R. ELLIS (2003: ix) argues, “if learners are to develop the competence they need to use a second language easily and effectively in the kinds of situations they meet outside the classroom they need to experience how language is used as a tool for communicating inside it”.

Tasks usually focus a lot more on oral language than on written language2, although writing, listening and reading tasks can be used as well. The learners’ exposure to the target language should be maximised, providing them with opportunities for receiving comprehensible input as well as allowing and enabling them to produce meaningful output. Such meaning is not completely pre-determined, as it used to be in previous approaches, but to a certain extent the learners’ own meanings are what counts, i.e., the task just provides a framework and the learners are allowed to negotiate the task while doing it, for example, by adding their own creative ideas in order to make the task also personally meaningful for the individual learners and not only potentially meaningful for the whole class. According to VAN DEN BRANDEN/BYGATE/NORRIS (2009: 6), “the performance of functional tasks involving meaningful language use is the starting point, primary mechanism, and final goal of educational activity” and this is what task-based language teaching can contribute to.

R. ELLIS even goes so far as to claim that task-based teaching reflects

… the issues that figure predominantly in current discussions of language pedagogy – the role of meaning-based activity, the need for more learner-centred curricula, the importance of affective factors, the contribution of learner-training, and the need for some focus-on-form. Task-based pedagogy provides a way of addressing these various concerns and for this reason alone is attracting increasing attention. (R. ELLIS 2003: 33)

This view fully embraces the task-based approach and sees it as the ultimate solution for all pedagogical issues in foreign language instruction. Be that as it may, at least the current status of task-based instruction can definitely not be seen as the solution for all form-related and linguistic issues, which is why this book recommends some caution concerning R. ELLIS’ view and tries to add a linguistic perspective to the equation, not wanting to accept the vague expression “some focus-on-form” but instead arguing that grammar needs to be approached more systematically.

Some researchers (such as SKEHAN 1998, R. ELLIS 2003 or SAMUDA/BYGATE 2008) distinguish between task-based and task-supported language learning. In task-based language learning, the complete syllabus is structured around tasks whereas in task-supported language learning3, tasks are not the only method of instruction, although they can and should be one of the key elements in the foreign language classroom. With the German system in mind, this book therefore rather suggests task-supported teaching ideas, as it is of course not possible to change a complete syllabus and/or curriculum overnight, especially since no suitable textbooks are available and since the idea of a task-based syllabus still clashes with current assessment and evaluation practices and regulations. This may change over the course of time, but currently tasks can only be implemented every now and then, whenever the need arises, for example, when introducing new grammatical features. Therefore, whenever the term ‘task-based teaching’ appears in this book, it refers to what some scholars see as ‘task-supported teaching’4.

The task-based literature provides a variety of definitions of what a ‘task’ is, which are discussed in the following sub-chapter. What all definitions have in common is that they differentiate tasks from exercises, as tasks are to be seen in a wider context and as the outcome is not just a linguistic result but a solution for a problem, in the widest sense of this expression. Exercises, in contrast, are normally decontextualised and focus exclusively on a specific linguistic form, for example, on the transformation of given active sentences into the passive voice, or – to give a non-grammatical example – on writing a summary of a text without focusing on pragmatic notions or learner interests. R. ELLIS (cf. 2003: 3) sums up the difference between a task and an exercise quite convincingly by claiming that in tasks the learners act primarily as language users, whereas in exercises they act primarily as language learners.