Goals and Outcomes in Task-Based Instruction

Any topic can give rise to a wide variety of tasks. One job of the course designer and teacher is to select topics and tasks that will motivate learners, engage their attention, present a suitable degree of intellectual and linguistic challenge and promote their language development as efficiently as possible.

You will notice that all the tasks illustrated have a specified objective that must be achieved, often in a given time. They are “goal-oriented”. In other words, the emphasis is on understanding and conveying meanings in order to complete the task successfully. While learners are doing tasks, they are using language in a meaningful way.

All tasks should have an outcome. For example, outcomes of some of the tasks would be the completed family survey, the final version of the family tree and the identification of the best-remembered person in the photograph and the linguistic forms in the context, or objects, etc.

The outcome can be further built on at a later stage in the task cycle. For example, by extending the pairs family survey to the whole class, how many families are predominantly male or female will be discovered.

It is the challenge of achieving the outcome that makes TBL a motivating procedure in the classroom.

An example of an activity that lacks an outcome would be: show students a picture and let them write four sentences describing the picture and talk to their partner about them. Here, there is no communicative purpose, only the practice of language form.

It is often possible, though, to redesign an activity without an outcome so that it has one. In the above example, if the picture is shown briefly to the students then concealed, the task could be: From memory, write four true things and two false things about the picture. Read them out to see if other pairs remember which are true. The students would be thinking of things they could remember, (especially things that other pairs might have forgotten!) and working out how best to express them to challenge the memories of the other pairs. To achieve this outcome they would be focusing first on meaning, and then on the best ways to express that meaning linguistically.