From tasking purposes to purposing tasks

To question synthetic syllabuses and PPP procedures is fairly commonplace in current ESOL practice. A recurrent alternative is to promote the adoption of task-based instruction (TBI) across the board. This has been an umbrella for a variety of di¤erent pairwork and group work (PW/GW) task types, whose purposes can be broadly classified under ‘independent collaboration’ and/or ‘communication’. Unfortunately, many collaborative language-focused tasks su¤er in terms of content from the shortcomings of planned syllabuses. Nor is it necessarily the case that such tasks would contribute to improvement in oral development, just as open-ended PW/GW communication tasks, in terms of expansion or correctness, do not necessarily lead to oral language development. Although pre-task preparation and post-task feedback are expected to compensate for this, in practice they are somewhat ephemeral. The conclusion is that rather than adopting classroom procedures and attaching purposes to them, we should start from a consideration of the level of the students and the purposes we wish to achieve—and then select appropriate classroom procedures to meet these purposes.