Lancaster University

Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages

MA in Applied Linguistics for ELT
Contributions to Language Learning – April 1999

Luiz Otavio de Barros Souza

luizotaviobarros@gmail.com

A My default “Prabhu schema” and the need to revise it.

Watching the video containing a sample lesson from the Bangalore (or
Communicational Teaching) Project was indeed a very insightful
experience. Until recently, the mention of Prabhu’s name would
usually conjure up images of restless kids talking in groups, with the
teacher lurking around in the background, controlling noise levels (!),
randomly monitoring students’ output and intervening as needed.
Interestingly, though, much of what I saw did not conform to what my
“pre-video Prabuh schema” had (mis) led me to expect from anything
remotely associated with the project. All I knew about Prabhu and the
project was largely based on what I had read about his views on
second language learning1 and how they influenced subsequent
models of Task Based Teaching (such as Willis, J. 1996). That perhaps
explains some of my earlier misconceptions, since Task Based
Teaching was – and still is, though to a lesser degree2 – generally
regarded as a strong version of Communicative Language Teaching,
on which the Bangalore Project never claimed to be premised, anyway.

Drawing on an RSA3 paradigm of what good teaching ought to look

like, my initial tendency was to be fiercely critical of the lesson. But
this picture began to change when I read Prabuh’s 1987 account of
the project, aptly entitled “Second Language Pedagogy”. Though I had
previously skimmed through some of its chapters, only now have I
become more keenly aware of a number of issues which, in retrospect,
I see as crucially important to any valid discussion of the lesson in

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 1

question. What these issues are and why they are significant will
hopefully become clear throughout this essay.
At this point it would probably make sense to explain what I mean by
an “RSA paradigm of good teaching”. Over the last 3 years I have done
a great deal of lesson observation, and that has provided me with
convincing inferential evidence that most RSA-compatible lessons (at
least those worth describing for present purposes) fall into two basic
categories in terms of classroom activity. The first of these comprises
grammar instruction organised around the PPP framework4, with an
emphasis on getting learners to produce “the structure of the day” (or
“function of the day”, for that matter) with varying degrees of linguistic
conformity, meaning-orientation and affective/intellectual
engagement. In the second case, I have witnessed more adventurous
teachers drawing on principles deriving from recent models of task
based instruction (such as Willis 1996) and making imaginative -albeit
often injudicious- use of such principles, thereby claiming to be
“teaching grammar through a task based methodology5”. Now, while it
is probably true that these lessons differ from their PPP counterparts
especially because the latter are based on the premise that declarative
knowledge can be proceduralised through practice (see Johnson
1996:137-151), there is one important common denominator: both
models accommodate rule-focused and form-focused activity, which
Prabuh (who certainly can’t be criticised for fence sitting!) rejected
uncompromisingly.

In other words, not only does Prabuh’s task based model bear very
little resemblance to PPP, it is also –perhaps ironically – in many ways
out of keeping with what Task Based Teaching has recently come to
mean to the profession anyway. What I am suggesting is that Prabuh’s
lesson was –and still remains, I think- in many ways a radical
departure from standard practice in ELT and therefore deserves to be
discussed in its own terms6. This is precisely what I will attempt to do
in this paper. Luiz Otávio Barros.

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 2

With this overall aim in mind, and with a view to fine-tuning my
“Bangalore schema” further, perhaps the first logical step is to
comment on Prabuh’s use of ELT terminology. Besides having created
a few project-related buzzwords, he has attributed somewhat narrower
meanings to a great deal of existing ELT jargon, as the table on the
next page shows.
Prabuh’s term What he means
Communicational Teaching aims at
Communicational developing grammatical
Teaching. competence through meaning-
focused work.
Purposeful use of a speaker’s
Deployment. grammatical competence under
real operating conditions.
“Self-initiated verbal formulation,
Production. resulting from a deployment of
linguistic competence" (Prabuh
1987:60)
Repeated exposure to / production
Recurrence. of a certain form of language, as
demanded by the task. The focus is
on meaning rather than form.
Internal system. Implicit, generative knowledge.
Rehearsal of the task as a parallel,In recent models, the term pre task
Pre task. whole class activity. Occupies
between ½ and 2/3 of the total
class time.
Task. A meaning-focused learning activity there seems to be an underlying
Task
with a non-linguistic outcome.
Task Based Model advocated by the project
Teaching. based on the exclusive use of
meaning-focused activity.
“The process of coping with a need
Meaning-focused. to make sense or get meaning
across”(ibid.:15) Attention to form is
Classroom Activity
incidental rather than intentional.
Activities intended to show the
Rule-focused. learner (explicitly) how the
language works.
©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved.
Related concepts
Communicative Teaching is a
related but different concept, in that
it is also concerned with functional
and social appropriacy.
Possibly “skill-using” (rather than
“skill-getting”) in River’s and
Temperley’s terms. (1978:5)
Different from the production phase
of PPP, in which students are given
“free” tasks to proceduralise a pre-
selected language item.
Different from repetition, which
focuses on form.
Learners’ interlanguage.
is often associated with the
presentation or pre-teaching of
some sort of linguistic content.
Different scholars define it in
different ways, but in most cases
preoccupation with meaning and
“getting things done” in the
language.
Recent models are far more
“eclectic” in terms of task types.
There is an explicit focus on form
and the syllabus is often-strangely
enough- a structural one.
Good skills development tasks
often embody Prabuh’s concept of
meaning-focused activity.
Teacher-fronted explanations or
more inductive consciousness-
raising activities would both qualify
as rule-focused in Prabuh’s terms.
3
 Form-focused. Planned language practice. Pattern practice and the like.

Meaningful. Similar to form-focused, but with an “Quasi-communicative activities”

additional preoccupation with (Littlewood 1981:86) and the like.
meaning and context.

B The lesson

Because of the limitations imposed by an amateur video such as the

one I watched, I was able to catch little more than only a few fleeting
glimpses of what was going on in the lesson at any one time and the
reader should remember that when considering most of the points I
will make in this essay. The reader should also hold in mind that the
snippet lasted approximately 25 minutes only, which means that all I
saw was the pre-task and an edited version of the task (see pg. 3 for
Prabuh’s definition of those).

There are, however, grounds for arguing that this short snippet of a
4th year lesson is fairly representative of what a typical project lesson
looked like and that is the assumption I will be making throughout
this essay. “Representative” not only as far as its constituent structure
is concerned, but also in terms of the instructional-methodological
aspects (see Wubbles et al 1992, cited by Williams and Burden
1997:199) of the participants’ behaviour. The same might not apply,
though, to most interpersonal aspects (same reference), clouded by the
artificiality of the situation – the lesson seemed to be Prabuh’s first
and perhaps only direct contact with those students.

Please refer to the appendix for a partial transcript of the lesson.

As I rewound the tape after the first viewing, I wondered what my

answer would have been if someone had asked me “So, how did you
like the lesson?” I probably would have come up with a host of
“Prabuh-bashing” arguments to explain why the lesson might be a

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 4

“fail” in RSA terms. Prabuh’s little wait time and a rather annoying
tendency to echo himself 7; tactless interventions and requests for
peer assistance; a rather dull treatment of the topic; plenty of
mechanic, skinner-inspired feedback (he seemed particularly fond of
“good”, “right” and “correct”), and so on and so forth. But if I had
chosen to concentrate on the above, I might have ended up missing
the whole point of this essay and only marginally addressed what I
believe is actually at issue, namely the mismatch between what I saw
and what my “good lesson schema” tells me a good lesson ought to
look like in terms of:

1. Choice of interactional engagement.

2. Comprehension (of teacher talk) / production (student talk) ratio.
3. The form / meaning balance in classroom activity.

In next three sections I will address the above issues. But first I want
to briefly report Prabuh’s views on those, in order to pave the way for
the forthcoming discussion.

1. On interactional patterns:

“The project did not use groupwork in the classroom (…) The
avoidance of group work was due to a wish to confine pedagogic
exploration to the project’s major principle, i.e., the significance of
meaning-focused activity in the classroom, which did not in itself
entail groupwork.” (pp. 81)

2. On comprehension and production:

“…differences such as these help to explain why comprehension can

take place from the beginning of language learning and why
production becomes feasible only at a much later stage. They also
show that the best preparation for production is continual
comprehension.” (pp. 80)

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 5

3. On meaning and form in classroom activity:

“Project teaching is aimed at meaning-focused activity to the exclusion

of the other three types” (pp. 28)

C Who talks to whom and who holds the power.

Many people would describe the village map lesson as very formal,
status-marked and asymmetrical, and it would not be easy to dispute
that. A cursory glance at the transcript in the appendix corroborates
this perception. While the teacher column on the left is crammed with
factual examples of what Prabuh said, the corresponding student
column is relatively empty. The verbs used to describe what the
learners did (write, draw, raise hands, respond) also appear to be
indicative of a high level of explicit teacher control throughout.
Prabuh’s informed choice not to step back and let learners work
cooperatively in groups means that, jargonistically speaking, the
“learner-centred” label might, and I say might, at first glance be
inappropriate. Thinking along these lines, “teacher-centred” would be
a more accurate way of describing the interactional engagement -and
the resulting power relations- in the lesson. Now, where do I stand on
this? Luiz Otavio Barros.

I think it would be fair to say that I am (or at least perceive myself to

be) ideologically committed to the “learner-centred” standpoint. For
the purpose of this essay, however, I am also committed to discussing
the lesson in its own terms. So the next few paragraphs are the result
of a conscious effort on my part to look at the issue from alternative
perspectives, guided by Widdowson’s wise assertion that “the roles of
classroom protagonists are not as straight forward as they might at
first appear”(1987:83).

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 6

To a certain extent, the term “teacher-centred” somehow implies that
Prabuh was ignoring the learning needs of the students, which I think
is at best a huge misconception. After all, if the project was set up in
the first place, its prime concern must have been students’ learning all
along - or so I would like to believe. Admittedly, at first glance Prabuh
does seem to fit the “instructor” rather than “facilitator of learning”
role (see Williams and Burden 1997:59). But it could be argued that
the reverse might be closer to the truth for two reasons. First, we
could regard Prabuh’s teaching as his attempt to create the conditions
which he deemed necessary for the sort of learning he 8 had
conceptualised to take place. In that sense, there is no compelling
reason to argue that in his teacher-fronted lesson he did not put on
his “facilitator” hat, as it were. Second, the “teacher as instructor” role
usually means that learners are automatically assigned the
“receptacles to be filled with knowledge” (same reference) role. That
was probably not the case. In the 25 minutes I watched, there was
hardly any deliberate transmission of “knowledge” in its strict sense,
which means that the “learners as active explorers” (same reference)
role is probably more descriptive of the learning process which some
of those extremely well-behaved students might have gone through
during the lesson.

That seems even more plausible if we accept Prabuh’s argument that

the lessons in the project should be described as neither teacher nor
learner-centred, but “task-centred” in the sense that “the teachers and
learners are bound by the rules of the task and the source of authority
is (…) the task, not the teacher.” (1987:51) Of course, as a rebuttal to
this point one might argue that the lesson still merits the teacher-
centred label, because it is the teacher who controls what goes on
through the task.

To try and persuade myself that there is nothing inherently wrong

with the sort of “meaning-focused lockstep” proposed by Prabuh, I
also resorted to the literature, but was not able to dig up much, with
the exception of some research done in 1985 by Wong-Fillmore and
©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 7
reported by O’Neill (1985:297-301). Wong-Fillmore conducted a three-
year study in Canadian Schools to discover that “by and large, the
most successful classes for language learning were the ones that
made greatest use of teacher directed activity”. However, I have no
further information about the context in which the study was carried
out, what was meant by “teacher-directed activity” and the criteria
against which “success” was measured. Therefore, I cannot possibly
draw on Wong-Fillmore’s study to substantiate Prabuh’s pedagogical
decisions.

D Who does most of the talking and why it should

matter

A few years ago I remember being observed for an RSA certificate

assessment lesson which turned out to be- at least from the observer’s
point of view- particularly successful. He seemed quite impressed by
“how skilful I was at controlling my TTT9 and letting students do most
of the talking.” According to the prevailing dogma at the time, there
was something inherently wrong about a lesson in which the teacher
spoke more than the students. Needless to say, Prabuh’s lesson would
not have had much to be said in its favour in that respect.

Nearly ten years have gone by since the aforementioned lesson and
nowadays, as an RSA tutor, I still find myself perpetuating my early
training paradigms. For example, virtually all of the lessons to which I
awarded, say, a Distinction, happened to be those in which students’
talking time was considerably higher than that of the teacher’s.
Needless to say, I am not alone in that. Ten years of ELT have
provided me with convincing inferential evidence that the profession
as a whole seems to have kept the “high STT10, low TTT” dogma
relatively unchallenged. Admittedly, there are a few brave attempts by
©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 8
people like Michael Lewis, who holds that “this absurd methodological
over simplification is the precise opposite of the truth in many
circumstances.” (1993:191). But his claim (whose rationale I hope will
become clear towards the end of this section) still seems to be greeted
with a great deal of scepticism.

The beliefs operating here are relatively easy to identify, and one of the
them might be that students should do most of the talking because it
is output, rather than input, that drives language acquisition forward.
Before we accept the plausibility of the “speaking to learn” hypothesis,
however, we must decide what we want the term output to mean. We
might, for example, regard it as any instance of speaking-like
behaviour, which would include repetition, pattern practice, “quasi-
communicative” activities (Littlewood 1981:86) and the like. In this
case, the rationale behind Prabuh’s heavily comprehension-based
model would be fairly easy to legitimise, since research to date has
largely discredited the pedagogical value of drill-like activities. (see, for
example, Skehan 1996:17-30 and Willis, D. 1996:44-51)

But we might decide that for output to qualify as production (as

Prabuh would use the term rather than in a PPP sense – see page 3), it
must be truly meaning-focused and bear some resemblance to what
happens in real life speech in terms of processing and reciprocity
conditions (see Bygate 1987:7). In this case, there are empirical
grounds for questioning the peripheral role of output in Prabuh’s
model. A much-heralded study done by Pica et al. (1989: 63-90)
corroborated the hypothesis that whenever learners attempt to
structure output with their interlocutors, the ensuing negotiation of
meaning enables them to attend to morphosyntax, which might
otherwise be bypassed during input processing. Their findings have,
in turn, lent empirical support to Swain’s comprehensible output
hypothesis (1985, cited by Pica et al. 1989:64, my italics), which holds
that input alone may not suffice for mastery of a second language.

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 9

The term “mastery” (or lack thereof) is of particular significance here.
In describing the context in which the project took place, Prabhu
(1987:5) pointed out that “(In India) English is widely regarded by
students and parents alike as the language of opportunities, opening
the doors to higher education (…), better jobs and so on”. In other
words, it seems that a high level of ultimate attainment would
probably be desirable. However, as we have seen, the present evidence
seems to suggest that an input-driven methodology might not be
enough to that end, which Krashen himself admitted when discussing
the applicability of his Natural Approach (Krashen and Terrel
1988:67).

In common with Krashen, Prabhu also operated with the notion that
“recurrent effort at comprehension would lead to the gradual growth
of an internal linguistic competence” (1987:70). Although he was
dismissive of production, he justified its peripheral role on the
grounds that by interacting with other their peers, learners would be
exposed to little “superior data” (ibid.: 81), which might hinder the
process of system revision and cause fossilisation. Plausible enough, it
would seem. The issue of ongoing exposure to what O’Neill calls
“junky input” (1991:303) has been addressed by an increasing
number of scholars in recent years. Ellis, for example, comments on
the difficulty of creating an acquisition-rich environment in the
communicative classroom (1997:51) and seems to advocate
comprehension-based learning as a viable strategy, drawing on several
different studies (ibid.: 150-151) to substantiate his point.

How learners process the teacher input they receive is, however,
another story altogether. In other words, input may or may not be
converted into intake. Krashen’s unproven and unfalsifiable but
compellingly logical hypothesis that “intake is first of all input that is
understood (…) and is a little beyond our current level of competence”
(1981:102-103) can throw some light on the issue and add a new
dimension to the present discussion: was the input comprehensible
for those learners? No one will ever know for sure and although the
©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 10
video provided me with some “soft” evidence, like the number of
students who put their hands up etc, I still have my doubts.

Admittedly, Prabuh did attempt to make the input he was providing

salient11 to as many learners as possible. His emphasis on recurrence
(see page 3) through deliberate self-echoing and parallel questions was
praiseworthy, especially if we consider that some scholars have found
positive correlations between the frequency of certain features in
teachers’ speech and their accurate production in learners’
interlanguage (Larsen-Freeman 1976, cited by Chandron 1988:158).
As for his deliberately slow rate of speech, patronising though I may
have personally found it, Hatch (1983:183, ibid.:154) has done some
research to confirm most people’s intuitive assumption that a slow
rate of speech might actually “allow for more processing time and
clearer segmentation of the structures of the input”. However, when
there were signs of non-comprehension, I did not find his rephrasing
very effective, as evidenced by directions such as “In the north-east,
not north, not east” (see appendix 1). Also, apart from the occasional
pointing and gesturing, I was under the impression that students were
provided with very few non-linguistic clues and were therefore
encouraged to draw too heavily on bottom-up processing. I am
assuming, of course, that Prabuh did not deliberately use that as a
pedagogical strategy.

At times I also got the sense that some of the input students were
being exposed to contained “i+2” or “i+3” rather than “i + 1”12(!). But
again, not knowing the students I cannot establish what “i” might
have been in the first place, let alone what was “a little beyond their
current level of competence” (Krashen 1981:102). At any rate, it seems
likely that different project teachers might have proved more or less
skilled at making input comprehensible and pitched at an adequate
level of difficulty in different circumstances. In other words, although
I had mixed feelings about how Prabuh handled the input he
provided, it would be unwise to generalise beyond what I saw.

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 11

E Form and meaning: a dichotomy ?

It might admittedly seem paradoxical that a project whose ultimate

goal was to develop grammatical competence should have done so by
means of an exclusive, uncompromising focus on meaning. But it
certainly can’t be denied that most of the theoretical foundations upon
which the Bangalore Project rests are in line with what SLA research
to date has told us about the way learners go about the job of
acquiring a second language.

When one examines the literature, the picture which tends to emerge
is that foreign language learning is a largely implicit, self-regulating
process, not amenable to teacher or materials control. An organic
process, as portrayed in Nunan’s terms (1998). It is claimed that
learners do not learn discrete items separately, in linear, cumulative,
PPP-like fashion (see Skehan 1996:17-30). Moreover, learning is
usually regarded as largely incidental in the sense that just as
learners fail to learn much of is taught, so a great deal of what does
get learned was never intended as teaching content in the first place.
In other words, there seems to be a “hidden curriculum” (Jackson
1968, cited by Littlejohn and Windeatt 1989:155) over which explicit
statements of what should be taught and how it should be taught (the
“manifest curriculum”) seem to be relatively powerless. On these
grounds, the teacher’s job would be to foster what Littlejohn and
Windeatt (1989:171) refer to as “experiential learning”, whereby
learning takes place through what learners are required to do, rather
than through what they are presented with.

Figure 1 is a useful summary of the dichotomy I have attempted to

describe:
A B
Implict Explicit
Hidden curriculum Manifest curriculum
Incidental learning Teaching Learning
Organic Linear
Experiential learning Referential
learning
©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 12
Simultaneous Cumulative
Synthesis Analysis

Needless to say, the sort of teaching Prabuh tried to promote was

informed by the views in the first box. However, it could be argued
that since the late eighties Prabuh’s “zero-option” (Ellis 1993:5)
orthodoxy has lost intellectual momentum. Grammar, in turn, has
made some sort of a comeback. Now, I do share Ellis’ scepticism as to
“whether it is achieving new popularity for the right reasons or in the
most appropriate ways” (same reference). But let us assume, for
present purposes, that it is. In this case, we could optimistically relate
this phenomenon to further SLA research which seems to have
demonstrated that by and large “instruction has what are possibly
positive effects on SLA processes, clearly positive effects on the rate at
which learners acquire the language and probably beneficial effects on
their ultimate level of attainment.” (Larsen-Freeman and Long
1991:321)

On those grounds, the notion of a dichotomy no longer holds up, and

neither does the project’s “zero-option.” Instead, the meaning / form
equation might be best represented as a continuum accommodating
different shades of grey, as it were:

Implict Explicit
Hidden curriculum Manifest
curriculum
Incidental learning Teaching
Learning
Organic Linear
Experiential learning Referential
learning
Simultaneous Cumulative
Synthesis Analysis

In Prabuh’s lesson surely there was no room for form-meaning shades

of grey. Or was there?

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 13

If I ever asked a group of ELT teachers to watch the video and try to
establish the aim13 of the lesson, I am quite sure there would be far
more contributions along the lines of “his aim was to teach there
is/are/prepositions” than examples of objectives stated in non-
linguistic terms. Could it be, then, that the lesson had a tacit
linguistic agenda? Maybe so. After all, the task did seem to have made
the use of certain language forms useful and natural (though by no
means essential) through deliberate recurrence (see page 3). But why
might that imply a tacit focus on form14? It seems to me that the
boundaries between Prabuh’s “recurrence” and Schmidt’s “noticing”
(discussed in Skehan 1998:48-49) are not clear-cut at all. In fact,
there seems to be a great deal of overlap between the two constructs.
Since the latter is usually associated with consciousness and induced
attention to morphosyntax, I could very boldly suggest that in the
lesson, largely despite himself, Prabuh might have made the focus on
form slightly less incidental than he would have wanted to.

F Final thoughts.

As the reader will appreciate, in this essay I did not attempt to develop
an original argument, nor did I state any such intention at the outset.
Instead, I chose not to draw too heavily on my own personal agendas,
by taking different stances and addressing relevant issues from more
than one single perspective. In that sense, I would like to believe that
my approach to this essay –in terms of choice of content and process-
might actually bear some resemblance to a hypothetical post-lesson
discussion with Prabuh himself.

In retrospect, this is what I think putting this essay together involved:

Read and heard about Prabuh and the project.

r to
vide
Prio


o

Associated it with strong Communicative Teaching.

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 14

 
Observed lesson(s) and was negatively impressed at first.


reading
Video +
Read Prabuh’s book and other relevant material.

Adjusted schemata.

Watched lesson again.

Identified issues worth discussing.

Writing + further

Tried to address those issues from different perspectives.

reading


Not as biased, but still lots of mixed feelings.

Resorted to the literature.

Some insights, more question marks and shades of grey.

Keener awareness of some of my beliefs.

Still limited, but deeper understanding of the project.
Now


Possibly more interested in further information.

Likely to interpret it through a renewed “Prabuh schema”.

Bashing Prabuh and the Bangalore Project would have been by far the
easiest option. Had I set out to do so, I could have resorted to a
plethora of published –and often believable- facts, figures and
arguments and might have ended up with a very persuasive piece of
work. But the fact that I chose not to do so makes this essay, in a
limited but real sense, unlike anything I have written so far in the MA
course, which I personally find very rewarding.

4424 words

References

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 15

Bygate,M. 1987. Speaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chaudron, C. 1988 Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning. New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Crookes,G. and Long, M.H. 1992. “Three Approaches to Task Based Syllabus Design”. In
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Ellis,R. 1993 “SLA Research: How does it Help Learners ? An Interview.” ELT journal, 47/1, pp
2-7.

Ellis,R. 1997. Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford
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Johnson,K. 1996. Language Teaching and Skill Learning. Oxford: Blackwell.

Krashen,S.D. 1981 Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford:
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Krashen,S.D. and Terrel,T.D. 1988 The Natural Approach. London: Prentice Hall.

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O’Neill, R.1991. “The Pluasible Myth of Leaner Centredness: or the Importance of Doing
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Nunan, D. 1996. “Teaching Grammar in Context”. In ELT Journal 52(2), pp. 101-109.

Pica, T. et al. 1989 “Comprehensible Output as an Outcome of Linguistic Demands on the

Learner”. SSLA 11, pp. 63-90.

Prabuh, N.S. 1987. Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Skehan, P. 1996 “SLA Research and Task-Based Instruction” In Willis, J. and Willis, D.(eds)
Challenge and Change in English Language Teaching pp. 17-30. London: Heinemann.

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Widdownson,H.G.1987. “The Roles of Teachers and Learners” In ELT Journal, 41/2, pp. 83-88.
©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 16
Williams, M. and Burden, R.L. 1997. Psychology for Language Teachers. A Social
Constructivist Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Appendix - partial transcript of village map lesson.

What Prabuh said What the students did / said

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 17

“Which blackboard can you see better?” (inaudible)

“What do you think that is ?” “Village.”

“Yes, it’s a village. Yes, we’re going to

make a simple map of a village. Now
listen to what I say and see if you can
draw … if you can, put your hands up
and I’ll ask you to come and draw.”

“In the centre, right in the middle, there is One student walked up to the board and
a large park… there is a park in the centre started drawing the map.
of the village…who wants to come and
draw?”

“In the centre of the village there is a Student hesitated.

large park… right?”

“Centre? Correct? Yes? OK?” “Yes”.

“In the middle of the village… that’s Student drew park and went back to his
correct… in the middle… yes, big one… seat.
good… yes…. correct ? Yes, good.
Next…

“There is a market… there is a market to Student drew market.

the west of the park… to the west of the
park, almost at the end of the village…
west of the park, near the end of the
village.”

“West of the park near the end. Right?” “Right”

Student drew market.

“What place is it… yes… market… that’s

good.”

“The school of the village is just to the Student drew school in the wrong place.
north of the park – not faraway- just to
the north of the park.”

“Right? Just to the north? “No.”

Park… north of the park” (points to the Student looked confused.
board)

“Not far away, not so far away… very Student pointed to the west.
near the park”

“No! No! Yes… but not so far away.” Student drew a road.

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 18

“What’s she drawing ?” (inaudible)

“That’s a road. School is a place. All Another volunteer went up to the board
right? No? What’s not right? Is it too far and drew the school further up north.
away? Yes?”

“Is that right?” “Right.”

“That’s at the end of the village. That’s

not what I said. I said just to the north…
very near to the park… not far from the
park… very near to the park…

“Yes, that’s right, yes… near the park, not A third volunteer drew the school in the
so far away… near the park, not so right place.
faraway. Yes, good thank you. Yes.”

“Now, the next question is difficult. The Student drew railway station.
railway station… the railway station in
this village is in the north-east corner, the
north-eastern corner… north… north…
east… north-eastern corner.”

“Yes, good, yes, what’s that place?” “Railway station.”

“Good, just write RS…” Student wrote rs.

“No, capital R… yes… good… yes… Student wrote RS.

that’s north… that’s east… and this is…
What’s this direction? What’s this
direction? That is north, that is east, this (inaudible)
is…

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 19

Endnotes

1 In this essay I will use the terms learning and acquisition

interchangeably.
2 See page 3.
3 Royal Society of Arts, more specifically the RSA COTE/DELTA

schemes.
4 PPP stands for presentation of a structure, followed by controlled

practice and opportunities for freer production. Though it has been

largely discredited in most academic circles, it is still one of the most
widely used frameworks for grammar instruction.
5 This is in many ways paradoxical, since one of the tenets of task

based instruction is that any sort of linguistic agenda should emerge

from the tasks/learners and focus on form should be incidental and
learner initiated.
6 For present purposes, in its own terms will mean in the project’s

terms.
7 Which later I discovered was a deliberate teaching strategy.
8 By he I mean all the other team members involved as well.
9 TTT stands for Teacher Talking Time.
10 STT stands for Student Talking Time.
11 I am aware, of course, that certain input features –particularly

those which are communicatively redundant- are inherently less

salient than others.
12 I am aware that Prabuh rejected Krashen’s i+1 construct.
13 I am using the terms aims and objectives interchangeably here.
14 For present purposes I have chosen to ignore Crookes and Long’s

distinction between focus on form and focus on forms. (1993: 27-56)

©Luiz Otávio Barros 1999. All rights reserved. 20