in the sentence: "Many years ago, a colleague and I went to...

Why study task design?

1.1 Designing language teaching tasks: an expertise study and a procedural analysis

Many years ago, a colleague and I went to Italy to run a series of workshops on how to write language teaching materials for use in the classroom. All the teachers attending our workshops were highly experienced, and had been selected because of their expertise as teachers. They were the crème de la crème. By the end of the sessions some of them had revealed themselves to be gifted materials designers, able to produce activities with accompanying teachers‘ notes such that the activities could be given to another teacher who would be able to use them in their own class with success. But what astonished me at the time was not how many successful materials designers emerged, but how many of the teaching crème de la crème showed no ability at all in the materials design realm. I think I had assumed that a good teacher would be able to produce good teaching materials for use by others. But the areas of expertise proved to be different.

This book is about designing, not whole textbooks, but one of their constituent parts – tasks or activities – for use in the foreign language classroom […].

Keith Johnson

From the book: Designing language teaching tasks