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Over the past two decades, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been introduced quite successfully into foreign language teaching methodology in wide parts of the world and a sizable number of current and especially future foreign language teachers have become acquainted with this approach during their studies as well as during diverse internships and trainings-on-the-job. However, task-based teaching has not yet found a solid way into foreign language classrooms. Textbooks do not integrate this approach, nor do curricula, as task-based teaching is seen as being partly incompatible with current views on didactic progression. This situation is understandable insofar as task-based language teaching does not – and does not want to – follow the rigid routine of a traditional foreign language textbook. This may be seen as a disadvantage by those teachers who have learned to rely exclusively on a text book series, but for teachers with a more creative mindset the integration of task-based teaching bears many advantages, which outweigh the disadvantage just mentioned, as it allows the teachers (as well as their learners) a lot more freedom to deal with everyday situations and current issues, which is usually perceived as immensely motivating by both teachers and learners alike.

Task-based language teaching stands in the tradition of the multitude of available communicative approaches, which is the reason why it mainly focuses on communication. Fostering communicative skills is certainly far from being a bad idea, but at the same time an exclusive focus on communication may frequently come at the expense of form. Many task-based language classrooms (as well as a sizable part of the task-based language teaching literature) therefore largely avoid grammar teaching, as the concepts of ‘grammar teaching’ in the teachers’ minds are generally connected to something negative, something that “has to be done” but is not necessarily fun. This rather negative attitude towards grammar is observable in many teachers and teacher trainees, who transport it subconsciously – and probably unwillingly – to their learners.

Yet, how can grammar be seen as fun or even as interesting when not even the teachers like it? Such a view of grammar is presumably still heavily influenced by the grammar drills and/or PPP methods (“presentation, practice, production”) that the teachers have encountered in their own school, university or internship days, where grammar was presented as a set of abstract structures with rules and exceptions which had to be learned by heart, and where grammar was not necessarily related to meaning. However, today, as CELCE-MURCIA (2001: 466) correctly claims, “grammar can no longer be viewed as a central, autonomous system to be taught and learned independent of meaning, social function and discourse structure”.

This book even goes a step further because it argues that grammar is as meaningful as lexis (just in a more abstract way) and that teaching grammar is therefore at the same time teaching meaning. This perspective is owing to the fast-growing body of research in theoretical cognitive grammar and in applied cognitive grammar, an approach which is seen as usage-based, i.e., as a descriptive and not a prescriptive way of looking at grammar in usage events, and which has already managed to develop meaning-based explanations of various grammatical phenomena and has empirically proven their effectiveness (although hardly ever in task-based classrooms). According to ACHARD/NIEMEIER (2004: 7), applied cognitive grammar is a good starting point for grammar instruction, “because the kinds of generalizations it posits to describe linguistic organisation can easily be made explicit, and thus incorporated into classroom practices”.

As grammar will definitely be an ever-present ingredient in any foreign language classroom, grammar teaching will always be a necessity. What will hopefully change is the perspective that teachers have concerning the concept of ‘grammar’, no longer seeing it as a necessary evil but seeing it as what it really is, namely a tool in the learners’ hands which enables them to say exactly what they want to say, thus contributing to and sometimes even establishing the meanings of the utterances the learners intend to make. Only if learners know how to flexibly use this tool in diverse situations will they be able to communicate efficiently.

This idea is quite close to PENNINGTON’s view, who argues that “grammar is a process of choosing forms and constructing language to respond to communicative demands, it essentially involves the learner’s creative response to context and circumstance” (1995: vii). If such a functional concept of grammar is then coupled with insights from cognitive grammar, which presents grammatical phenomena as bearing meaning and as the language users’ deliberate choices of construal and not just – as in traditional views on grammar – as prescriptive and rule-governed ways of using the language, learners have the chance to stop seeing grammar as a straightjacket and to start seeing it as the tool it is, which should also enable them to use the foreign language creatively and not just reproductively. This is certainly easier the more advanced a learner is, but also less advanced learners can use language creatively, although with certain restrictions, as of course their linguistic repertoire is smaller than that of more advanced learners. Using language creatively will also benefit an outside-of-the-classroom use of the foreign language, as a creative use of language is exactly what happens in ‘real’ communication, which is quite different from the pseudo-communication that can be found in the majority of more conventional foreign language classrooms.

According to ALLWRIGHT/HANKS (2009: 51), task-based language teaching “puts learners in an unconventional and perhaps unusually proactive relationship to their classroom learning. They have more room to show seriousness of purpose, some capacity for decision-making and space to be unique”, an important quote which already mentions several crucial aspects of this approach. Task-based language teaching can be seen as an action-oriented approach, which can be enhanced by integrating grammar teaching in a non-explicit way, i.e., “by the backdoor”, while the learners may not even notice that what they are learning IS indeed grammar. They will be involved in situations that they may, at least to a certain extent, also encounter outside their classrooms and they are given communicative tasks they are to work on and solve, usually with a partner or in small groups.

These situations and tasks have to be carefully chosen and developed by the teacher so that in order to fulfil a task the learners need to use a specific grammatical phenomenon. In this way, not only the communicative topic is foregrounded in the lesson, as is usual in task-based classrooms, but the lesson focus is instead two-pronged, as a grammatical topic goes hand-in-hand with the communicative topic. What teachers need to invest for preparing such lessons is especially their creativity, as they have to come up with communicative situations which more or less force the learners to use a specific grammatical structure and which additionally cater to different learner types. This book suggests to use WILLIS’ task cycle in a modified way (cf. WILLIS 1996). During the pre-task the teacher already uses the grammatical phenomenon in question but does not yet expect the learners to use it, while during the task itself the structure may and should already be used by the learners. Only after the learners have presented their task outcomes is the grammatical structure in question explicitly focussed upon. In other words: in this book, the task-based approach is enhanced and coupled with insights into (cognitive) grammar, and these two approaches jointly become a very useful tool for the foreign language classroom.

So far, tasked-based language teaching and cognitive grammar have not frequently been brought together. TYLER (2012) has presented some suggestions, but has not delved deeply into the topic. CADIERNO/ROBINSON (2009) have used pedagogic tasks to teach the construal of motion events and JACOBSEN (2016) has conducted an experiment on the task-based teaching of the English conditional from a cognitive grammar perspective, the results of which show that the cognitively based way of teaching was more successful than the task-based approach on its own and that both of these ways of teaching worked better than traditional methods. The connection between task-based teaching and cognitive grammar definitely seems to be a fruitful one, although this can only be claimed with caution, as there is still a lack of studies.

This book intends to show that a connection of task-based teaching and cognitive grammar is indeed a very fruitful one, as the two approaches can be integrated in order to yield the approach of task-based grammar teaching (TBGT). The book consists of two main parts, a more theoretical one and a more practical one, and is structured as follows. The first part discusses the didactic as well as the linguistic theoretical background, starting with some general reflections on the role of grammar teaching in various didactic approaches and pointing out the necessity of grammar instruction. Chapter 2 summarises the development of task-based language teaching, discusses its advantages and disadvantages as well as various unresolved questions that researchers do not all agree upon, such as the role of grammar in this approach. It furthermore outlines general ways of implementing the approach into the foreign language classroom, focusing mainly on WILLIS’ task cycle. Chapter 3 offers a concise introduction to cognitive grammar and its applications and additionally outlines their potential for the foreign language classroom. Chapter 4 then brings the two approaches of task-based language teaching and applied cognitive grammar together and explains how one can profit from the other.

Subsequently, the second part of this book translates the rather theoretical perspectives of the first part into actual teaching practice. It discusses ten case studies on diverse grammatical phenomena, which were chosen according to their relevance for the foreign language classroom, starting out with the TAM complex that every verb entails (tense, aspect, modality – treated separately due to ease of explanation although they actually belong together), continuing with conditional clauses and the passive voice, tackling prepositions and phrasal verbs, and finally focusing on verb complementation in complex sentences as well as on pronoun usage and article usage. The book does not intend to provide model lessons or teaching recipes but instead uses one teaching example in each of the chapters to explain in detail how the grammatical phenomenon in question can be implemented in a task-based way into a communicative situation. Further possible communicative situations and tasks are briefly indicated after the explanations of the teaching examples. Most grammar topics are discussed with a secondary school audience in mind. Those topics which are also suitable for a primary school audience (or for (pseudo-) beginners in secondary school who do not have a solid foundation from their primary school English years), such as prepositions, pronouns and articles, are discussed for an audience of less advanced learners but can also be used with more advanced learners in order to help them reorganise their grammar skills.

The references following each chapter list the publications which are quoted in the chapters and which can be consulted for more in-depth information. In some instances, further basic texts have been added.