Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 3

Editorial · Hu & Hashim · Ellis · Machida

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This is the third in a series of posts in which I analyse the May 2026 issue of JALT Journal cover to cover, reading not so much for what each piece contributes but for what the whole reveals about the world the writers share.

Task-Based Language Teaching — Rod Ellis

Rod Ellis needs no introduction for anyone who has worked in applied linguistics.

The editorial describes the article as being by “none other than the prominent scholar and applied linguist, Rod Ellis.”

Ellis’s bio also speaks for itself:

Rod Ellis is an Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor in Curtin University (Australia), an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the University of Auckland, a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and in the top 1% of social and humanities scientists in the world. He has held teaching positions in universities in Zambia, UK, Japan, USA, New Zealand and Australia and has conducted talks and seminars throughout the world on second language acquisition and task-based language teaching.

I was glad to see Rod Ellis’s name when I opened this issue. He is one of the most prominent figures in applied linguistics, and his presence in a Japan-based journal is noteworthy. I have wanted for some time to carefully read a recent piece by a really mainstream figure — to see where there are overlaps with my own concerns and where the field’s established language begins to show its limits. An article like this one, written in the author’s own voice, makes that possible.

This is an "exposition" article, not a research report. Ellis is not constrained by the format of a single study. He can be more synthetic, personal, and position-taking. That makes the article especially useful for this series. It shows how a major figure maps the field when he is explaining the work he has spent decades developing.

The article is an overview of Task-Based Language Teaching, or TBLT, framed within a few autobiographical remarks. Ellis explains why he moved from second language acquisition research toward TBLT, gives an account of the principles of the approach, answers criticisms largely by treating them as misunderstandings of the framework, and discusses practical questions around sequencing, lesson stages, explicit instruction, individual differences, and teacher preparation.

What interests me here is the map the article gives us: what it keeps in view, what it moves to the edge, and what it cannot quite hold together.

What the map centres

Ellis begins by explaining why he moved from second language acquisition research toward TBLT. His opening is practical in direction. His interest in SLA, he says, was “motivated” by his background as a teacher and teacher educator, and by the idea that if we understand how learners learn, we will be better placed to create instructional conditions that support learning. He is locating his interest in TBLT outside theory alone. The movement came from teaching, teacher education, and concern with what happens in classrooms.

His time in Japan then enters the article. Ellis writes that his interest in TBLT was also motivated by the years he spent in Japan from 1989 to 1993. He says he was struck by the fact that many students, after years of studying English at school, were unable to hold even a simple conversation. He recalls that the first doctoral dissertation he supervised found that up to 90% of the talking time in English lessons in high schools was conducted in Japanese. He links this to a structural approach that treated language as a set of facts to be studied and learned explicitly.

From that starting point, the movement toward TBLT is easy to follow. If students have spent years studying English but cannot use it easily, then the problem is not simply that they need more facts (Ellis's word) about English. Something is wrong with the map of learning that has been guiding the work. The centre of attention shifts from form studied in advance to language used for meaning and purpose in the moment.

The article then moves into its main work: defining TBLT as an approach. In Ellis’s account, task becomes the central unit of both syllabus and lesson. A task is not just an activity added to a lesson. It is what the syllabus is organised around, and what the lesson is built from.

In a structural syllabus, the centre is the language item: a tense, a structure, a form, a function, a vocabulary set. In TBLT, the centre is the task. The learner is not first given a structure and then asked to practise it. The learner is asked to use language to do something. Meaning comes first. Form can be attended to, but it is not meant to control the activity from the start. If tasks are simply added to a structural syllabus, then the older centre remains in place. The syllabus is still organised around language items, with tasks brought in to support them. In TBLT, by contrast, the task itself carries the organising weight.

Ellis sets out five principles: the primacy of task, the primacy of meaning, the stages of a task-based lesson, no prior explicit teaching of the target language, and focus on form. A task-based lesson is not just a communicative activity placed after presentation and practice. It has a different order. Learners engage with meaning first. They perform the task. Attention to form can arise in relation to the task rather than being installed before the task begins.

The map is clear because the centre is clear.

Around the task gather the article’s main questions: how tasks are defined, how they differ from exercises, how lessons are staged, how tasks might be sequenced, where explicit instruction belongs, how individual differences are handled, and how teachers might be prepared. These questions follow from what has been placed at the centre.

This is the article’s strength as exposition. It gives a clean account of what TBLT sees and how it organises what it sees. It can explain why task-based teaching is not simply structural teaching with communicative activities attached. It can show why meaning matters, why the order of the lesson matters, and why explicit instruction has to be placed carefully rather than assumed as the starting point.

But the clarity also tells us where to look next. Once the task is at the centre, other parts of the educational situation appear in relation to task. The teacher appears in relation to task. The learner appears in relation to task. Explicit instruction appears in relation to task. Individual difference appears in relation to task. Engagement, later, will appear in relation to task.

What the map moves to the edge

The social turn enters the article abruptly.

Ellis writes:

Recently, however, SLA and applied linguistics in general have developed other goals in response to the "social turn" that Block (2003) called for. To my mind "turn" has turned into a "swamp," with key conferences such as the American Association of Applied Linguistics annual conference prioritising social rights and marginalizing applied linguistics for language teaching. I acknowledge the need to address social equity (and inequity) but regret the loss of focus on what I still consider the area where SLA and applied linguistics can have a practical—as opposed to ideological—impact.

The word swamp is the word to pause over. It is a word of dismissal.

The practical concern Ellis wants to defend is clear. Applied linguistics, in his view, should not lose sight of language teaching. It should be able to say something useful about classrooms, learners, teachers, and the conditions that help language learning happen. That concern is not small. It is one of the reasons TBLT exists.

But the concerns he pushes against are not outside education either. Social rights, equity, identity, power, access, and institutional pressure all belong to the same educational world. They enter classrooms through learners, teachers, materials, policy, assessment, language choice, and the roles people are asked to occupy.

The article has no developed place for that relation. Practical language teaching appears on one side. Social or ideological concern appears on the other. The map Ellis is operating with gives him a clear way to defend task-based language teaching against structural teaching. It gives him a clear way to distinguish TBLT from task-supported teaching. It enables him to discuss sequencing, focus on form, lesson stages, and teacher preparation. But when a different map of the field appears, the language changes. The map does not expand to include it. The word swamp marks the place where the conversation stops.

I am reading the journal issue as the field speaking to itself. Here, one part of the field is not really speaking with another part. It is dismissively naming it as a problem and moving on.

The passage is also striking because it is one of the few places where the article feels personally charged. There is regret in it as well as dismissal. Ellis is saying that something he values has been displaced. But the article does not stay with that experience. It does not ask what the social turn has been trying to answer, or why so much of applied linguistics has moved in that direction, or how practical language teaching and social concern might be held in the same frame. It returns to TBLT. A major concern has entered the article, been placed outside the centre of the map, and been left there.

The 90% figure

Ellis writes that the first doctoral dissertation he supervised found that up to 90% of the talking time in English lessons in Japanese high schools was conducted in Japanese. The figure is vivid. It does the work figures often do. It gathers a large, messy classroom reality into something that can be carried.

Planners and policymakers can use a figure like this to make demands: reduce Japanese, increase English, set targets. From there it is a short step to prescription. Teachers should conduct 60% of the lesson in English, or 70%. That may look like reform. It will certainly put new pressure on teachers while leaving the underlying realities untouched.

The figure clearly points to something serious. If students have studied English for years and cannot hold a simple conversation, and if most of the talking time in English lessons is conducted in Japanese, there is something to examine. But the percentage itself does not show what should be changed. It does not tell us what the lesson felt like, what the teacher was holding together, or what students were able to risk. Most importantly, it does not tell us whether the learners and teachers were enjoying themselves. That word — enjoying — does not appear often in this kind of writing. It should.

Without a map and language that invites questions such as these, the number is too easily read as a remedy and prescription: use less Japanese, use more English.

Ellis uses the figure to help explain the move from structural teaching to TBLT. That is understandable. But the figure also shows how easily classroom life can be converted into a quantity. Once converted, it can be taken up by people far from the classroom and returned to teachers as pressure.

The number is not only evidence against a structural approach. It is also a test of the map. A map that can hold the whole classroom situation would not move from percentage to prescription. It would ask how the classroom is working, what teachers are being asked to carry, what kinds of participation are becoming possible for learners, and whether the people involved can enjoy the work.

Ellis uses the figure to make the case for TBLT and goes no further.

What learners make of the tasks

Later in the article, Ellis turns to sequencing. If task is the central unit, he says, sequencing matters. A syllabus has to be ordered somehow. Teachers and curriculum designers need some basis for deciding which tasks come first, which come later, and how difficulty should be understood.

Ellis reviews the search for design criteria for assessing task complexity and calls it “a fruitless exercise.” He gives several reasons: there is no empirically grounded account of task complexity; research can distinguish very simple from very complex tasks, but not fine levels between them; how learners perform tasks is unpredictable to a very large extent; tasks are conglomerates of design features; and cognitive demands cannot be separated from implementation.

One of those reasons is this:

The same task can be successfully performed by learners at different developmental levels. What determines the complexity of the language produced in such tasks is not the design features of the tasks but what learners make of the tasks.

Ellis is talking about output-based tasks and the difficulty of using design features to sequence them. But the observation reaches further than he takes it. If what learners make of a task matters more than its design features, then the whole apparatus of levelling, sequencing, and grading materials is built on shakier ground than the field acknowledges. Learners will make of any material what they are ready to make of it — regardless of where it has been placed in a sequence, regardless of how it has been levelled, regardless of what the designer intended. The complexity is not in the task. It is in the encounter.

Ellis draws back to the problem of sequencing. But the observation he has made points somewhere else entirely: toward a way of thinking about learning materials that does not depend on controlling the learner's path through them.

The task is the occasion; the learner is where the action is.

This is where the article begins to touch something the map cannot quite hold. The task’s design features do not tell the whole story. The same task may become quite different things in different rooms, with different learners, on different days.

In the article, this recognition remains inside the problem of sequencing. What learners make of the task appears as a difficulty for ordering tasks, not as a reason to rethink how much of language teaching can be understood through ordered units in the first place.

Engagement

In the section on individual differences, Ellis writes:

How learners differ in the performance of tasks requires investigating their engagement with the tasks—engagement is the key construct.

The word construct is worth pausing over. It signals that engagement is being taken up as a research object — something to be operationalised, defined, and measured. Before anything else has been said about it, engagement has been placed inside the research frame. And not just the research frame: Ellis is naming engagement with tasks, in a section about how learners differ in task performance. Engagement is already packaged inside two frames at once.

And yet it carries weight. It says that the learner’s relation to the work cannot be treated as secondary. However well a task is designed, the educational question still depends on whether learners enter it, stay with it, and make something of it.

Earlier in the article, engagement has already appeared as something that can be measured through behavioural, cognitive, affective, and social aspects. Here, Ellis does something more interesting. He distinguishes the researcher’s approach from the teacher’s. Researchers, he says, are likely to continue with an “encapsulated approach,” looking at specific individual differences and their effects on task-generated engagement. Teachers, by contrast, are likely to resist viewing learners as “discrete bundles of variables” and lean toward a more holistic view.

That is an important distinction. Ellis sees the problem. He names it. Engagement is not just one more learner variable alongside aptitude, working memory, anxiety, or personality. It happens in a particular encounter. A class can be engaged on one day and absent on the next. A learner who is alive in one lesson can be elsewhere in the next. That is not simply a property of the learner. It belongs to the encounter, not the learner alone.

A learner can do what the task requires without becoming interested or willing to risk anything. The task can be completed, the language can be produced, and still very little may have happened. The reverse is also true. A small exchange, a correction, a moment of understanding, a joke, a choice, or a brief success may become alive because the learner was fully there. That is not simply a matter of task design. It is a matter of what the whole situation makes possible.

The article touches something the map cannot quite hold. Engagement is named as central, and Ellis recognises that teachers see learners more holistically than researchers do. But that recognition remains inside the section on individual differences. The teacher’s holistic view appears as a contrast within the framework, not as something that reorganises it.

In Ellis’s article, engagement remains inside the TBLT frame. The word points toward the learner’s presence in the work, but the map brings it back as something to be studied in relation to task.

What the map cannot yet hold together

Near the end of the article, Ellis writes that TBLT accords with “the importance of experiential learning that creates links with learners’ lives and the outside world.”

It is not only about task. It reaches beyond the internal language of the framework. Experiential learning. Learners’ lives. The outside world. These are educational terms before they are TBLT terms. They point to something larger than the design, sequencing, staging, and measurement of tasks.

But the article does not quite have a map in which these concerns can be held together.

The social turn appears as a swamp. The 90% figure stands as part of the case for TBLT. What learners make of tasks remains inside the problem of sequencing. Engagement is noticed and then packaged. Experiential learning, learners’ lives, and the outside world appear in the conclusion, but they do not reorganise the article.

The article repeatedly reaches toward the educational situation as a whole: teacher, learner, task, language, institution, social concern, classroom pressure, learner participation, and life outside the classroom. But each time, the concern is brought back into the available language of the framework.

That is not a failure of this article alone. It is what makes the article worth reading. Ellis speaks clearly in the language afforded him by the framework, and in doing so unwittingly shows where that language is no longer enough.It can speak about task design, sequencing, lesson stages, focus on form, individual differences, and implementation. It finds it harder to speak about how all of those belong together in the lived educational situation.

The question that remains is not whether TBLT is useful. It clearly is. The question is what kind of map would allow practical teaching, social concern, teacher judgement, learner participation, institutional pressure, and learners’ lives to be seen together.

Ellis's article does not set out to show us that such a map is needed. But that is what it shows.

Closing

The article is not only an exposition of TBLT. It is also a record of a field working at the limits of its own map.

What does not stay neatly inside that centre: the swamp, the 90% figure, what learners make of tasks, engagement, and the final appeal to experiential learning, learners' lives and the outside world. None of these is outside language teaching. They are all part of the lived experience of learners and teachers. But they do not all fit easily into the same map.

The field does not appear to see that it is reaching beyond its inherited language.

The article also shows how much remains to be mapped — what teachers carry, what learners bring, what classrooms make possible, and how experience belongs in the work rather than at its edges.

Ellis's article makes unsettled and unnoticed questions easier to hear.