Norris, Brown, Hudson, and Yoshioka (1998) provide examples of representative real-world
tasks grouped according to themes. For example:
Theme: planning a vacation
Tasks
- decide where you can go based on the "advantage miles"
- booking a flight
- choosing a hotel
- booking a room
Theme: application to a university
Tasks
- applying to the university
- corresponding with the department chair
- inquiring about financial support
- selecting the courses you want and are eligible to take, using advice from your adviser
- registering by phone
- calculating and paying your fees
It is hard to see that this classification offers much beyond the intuitive impressions of the
writers of Situational Language Teaching materials of the 1960s or the data-free taxonomies
that are seen in Munby's Communicative Syllabus Design (1978). Nor have subsequent
attempts at describing task dimensions and task difficulty gone much beyond speculation (see
Skehan 1998: 98-99).
In addition to selecting tasks as the basis for a TBLT syllabus, the ordering of tasks also has
to be determined. We saw that the intrinsic difficulty of tasks has been proposed as a basis for
the sequencing of tasks, but task difficulty is itself a concept that is not easy to determine.
Honeyfield (1993: 129) offers the following considerations:
1. Procedures, or what the learners have to do to derive output from input
2. Input text
3. Output required
a) Language items: vocabulary, structures, discourse structures, process ability, and so on
b) Skills, both macro-skills and subskills
c) World knowledge or "topic content"
d) Text handling or conversation strategies