The Language Teacher
November 2001
Rethinking Text Within A Task-based Approach to Language Teaching
Christopher N. Candlin
The City University of Hong Kong
Mark Evan Nelson
Kanda University of International Studies
Neil H. Johnson
Kanda University of International Studies
As language educators, if we believe that language is a living and evolving tool for social interaction and interpersonal meaning-making, or in Halliday's own terms, a "social-semiotic" system (1978), we can appreciate the vital importance of meaningfully engaging learners in the construction and interpretation of written and oral language, that is texts. Yet, given what we have come to know about language and how it is most effectively learned, the construct of task must also be a crucial consideration in the design of a language-learning program. It is the opinion of the authors that a complex and important reciprocity exists between texts and tasks; the purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and potentialities of that reciprocal relationship.
The employment of tasks in language learning can broadly be traced back to the beginnings of the communicative approach in the early 1980s. SLA research suggested that interaction on the part of learners in the context of meaningful language tasks was key to promoting negotiation of meaning, which triggers acquisitional processes in language learning (Long & Robinson, 1998). Though there has been some debate among proponents of the task-based approach as to exactly what characterizes a task, for our purposes a useful definition is provided by Bygate, Skehan, and Swain. They define task with regard to learners and learning, as ". . . an activity influenced by learner choice, and susceptible to learner re-interpretation, which requires learners to use language, with emphasis on meaning to achieve an objective" (2001:11). Interestingly, if we accept this definition as valid, we might also claim that a text, in and of itself, fulfills the requirements for "task-hood," in a sense. We may view texts as, by their nature, tasks waiting to happen.
To understand this, it is useful to view text from this social-semiotic point of view. Halliday and Hasan describe text as "a continuous process...there is a constantly shifting relationship between a text and its environment . . . the essential feature of text therefore is that it is interaction." (1989:139) Environment here may be understood as the factors that impact on meaning in the text, and interaction refers to the fluid, continuous process of cognitive negotiation that these factors participate in, which results in a continual revision and reinterpretation of meaning within a text. In other words, every time a text is approached, there is a natural interplay between the reader/listener, current circumstances, history, language, etc. that directly shapes the way that text is understood; and because these factors are not fixed, neither is the meaning of a text. A more concrete, practical list of these factors may include the following:
Participants: This refers to the author of a text, the author's intended audience, the actual audience that interacts with a text, as well as perhaps parties represented in the text itself. The knowledge, experiences, emotions, predispositions, prejudices, of these participants greatly impacts and shapes the communication act that a text represents, resulting in widely varying responses to and interpretations of the text.
Environment: A text's environment may, for our purposes, be understood as the time and circumstances in which a text is created as well as those in which it is interpreted. Over the course of a thousand years, a month, even a minute, the evolution of events can dramatically affect the meaning of a text.
Presentation Mode: One particular text can be carried, in effect, by a range of "vehicle" types. Fundamentally, texts can be presented orally, in writing, or by means of both, but further delineations can be drawn to distinguish interpersonal conversation, letters, video, audiotape, books, electronic media. A text that is read on a computer monitor may well invoke a very different response than would result from hearing the same text read aloud on a taped recording. In this sense, texts are always multimodal.
Text Type: Text type is a construct that is related to yet distinct from the presentation mode. This refers to the archetypal texts that are familiar to us through their generic structures, and the formal, stylistic, and semantic expectations that we have of them. By way of example, if you were to imagine a newspaper in your mind's eye, you would likely see strings of small print presented in columns with larger headlines introducing them. You might also envision headlines featuring quite economical phrasing, devoid of articles, and stories characterized by an even, passionless accounting of events. These archetypes do change and evolve and, in fact, as with the newspaper, there are text genres that are actually a composite of many genres; our knowledge of these generic text types profoundly influences the ways we approach and understand specific examples of them.
A more complete explication of this construct would reveal other salient factors, but these four serve to illustrate an important, basic point: a text, with its participants, environment, and other qualities has a history, and this history continually evolves in context. Duranti and Goodwin cogently make this point when they assert, "a focal event cannot be properly understood, interpreted appropriately or described in relevant fashion, unless one looks beyond the event itself to other phenomena (for example cultural setting, speech situation, shared background assumptions) within which the event is embedded" (1992:3). The significance of this notion is that it allows us to look at text from a new perspective. We see a text, when activated by a learner, as dynamic, subjective, and necessarily, fundamentally communicative. We recognize that a learner who is engaged with a text is, in fact, already engaged in a task.
Yet, if we are to understand a text as having the qualities and serving the functions of a communicative task, we must next try to understand the construct of text in task terms. What exactly is the nature of the engagement that a learner has with a text? What is the learner thinking and doing? As teachers, how do we prepare learners to tackle text-tasks meaningfully and successfully?
In an attempt to begin to answer these questions, we might usefully think about learner engagement with a text as an investigative, creative process. Like any great mystery, every text contains some hidden objective truths, some answers; yet, there are also many peripheral details, nuances, and shades of meaning that are open to interpretation. In fact, it is the process of making and integrating these peripheral interpretations that most often leads to gaining a more complete, global understanding of a situation.
This is why the process of negotiating through a text-task is both investigative and creative. Seeing a text as dynamic and communicative requires a learner to approach the text as an event, as opposed to an object. Accordingly, it is highly desirable for learners to be able to tease out the meaning-making factors in the text, that is, participants, environment, etc. However, this is not and should not be a process of simple decoding.
A text also offers the opportunity for creative participation on the part of the learner in the text event. Each learner contributes to the text his or her own knowledge of the world, text themes, conditions for text production, lexicon, and grammar, etc. that arguably produce as much real meaning, if not more, as what the text itself presents. A pedagogic procedure for negotiating texts must draw upon learners' critical ability to decipher clues they find in the text -- what Eagleton refers to as "invitations to construct a piece of language into meaning" (1983:76) -- as well as their creative ability to infuse the text with what they bring themselves. This learner participation in and contribution to the text is what preserves the continuing history, the dynamic vitality of a text.
In this paper some very broad strokes have been sketched and there are many questions that remain unanswered. Challenges that we face include developing learners' awareness of the meaning-making factors they will encounter in a text-event; creating exercises and tasks that engender in learners the skills and sensitivity necessary to effectively bring their investigative and creative faculties to bear on a text; extending the act of reading/viewing a text toward the act of doing something, that is, using text as a trigger for action. These are topics for further investigation, but for now, it is hoped that the reader has been given cause to consider whether the solitary act of reading this paper was really so solitary after all.
References
Bygate, M., Skehan, P. & Swain, M. (Eds.). (2001). Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching and testing. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Duranti, A. & Goodwin, C. (Eds.). (1992). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory. London. Blackwell Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as social semiotic. London. Arnold Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context and text: Aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Long, M. & Robinson, P. (1998).
Focus on form: Theory, research and practice.
In C. Doughty & J. Williams (Eds.). Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
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