Literature review: EFL syllabus design (Continued).
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3.4.4.2.2. The procedural syllabus.
The Procedural syllabus is associated with Prabhu, Ramani and others (then) at the Regional Institute of English in Bangalore, India. Prabhu was dissatisfied with the Structural-Oral-Situational method which had been developed and was generally in use in the 1960s, so he evolved an approach based on the principle that the learning of form is best carried out when attention is given to meaning (cf. Palmer, 1917/1968). The Bangalore Madras Communicational Teaching Project (CTP) (Prabhu 1980; 1984; 1987) was implemented in eight classrooms with 18 teachers and 390 children aged 8 to 15, for periods of one to three years, from 1979 to 1984. Early influences were similar to those of the Malaysian communicative syllabi (Rodgers 1979; 1984), but were quickly abandoned. The Project was not set up as an experiment, so evaluation was not part of the original plan, and Beretta and Davies, when carrying out an evaluation in 1984 (Beretta & Davies 1985), had to use intact classes, rather than operate in a "stripped down environment" (Beretta 1986a) with limitations on the validity of their findings. They saw the results of the evaluation as on the whole positive, though pointing out the difficulty of designing satisfactory Which? type comparative research procedures to evaluate methodologies (cf. Cronbach 1963). However, Greenwood (1985) suggests that none of the accounts of the project  offered sufficient evidence to evaluate the claims made for the procedural syllabus and its associated methodology (White 1988:108).

At the basis of the CTP are tasks which engage the learner in thinking processes, the focus of which is completion of the task rather than learning the language, agreeing with Krashen (1982) that language form is acquired subconsciously when the learner's attention is focused on meaning (cf. table 30, below): 

TABLE 30: THE CTP MODEL (ADAPTED FROM WHITE 1988:103).

Task-based teaching operates with the concept that, while the conscious mind is working out some of the meaning-content, some subconscious part of the mind perceives,  abstracts or acquires (or recreates, as a cognitive structure) some of the linguistic structuring embodied in those entities, as a step in the development of an internal system of rules. The intensive exposure caused by an effort to work out meaning-content is thus a condition which is favourable to the subconscious abstraction - or cognitive formation - of language structure. (Prabhu 1987:69-70). Teaching through communication, rather than for communication (Prabhu 1980:164) was an important aspect of this programme, though it is interesting to note that the core goal was grammatical, rather than communicative competence, interaction in the target language, or activation and development of learning skills:

The radical departure from CLT in the Bangalore Project lay not in the tasks themselves, but in the accompanying pedagogic focus on task completion instead of the language used in the process. (Greenwood 1985)

Teacher speech was not pre-selected or structurally graded, but "roughly tuned", and errors ("ungrammatical learner utterances") were accepted for their content, although subject to "'incidental' as opposed to 'systematic' correction" (Prabhu 1987:57-9). The tasks focused upon the learners' use and development of their own cognitive abilities through the solution of logical, mathematical and scientific problems, and the procedural syllabus focused upon what was to be done in the classroom and not upon selected language input for learning. Finally, the syllabus of tasks was not pre-planned but:

... was evolved during the teaching and learning by a process of trial and error whereby new tasks could become more sensitive to the achievements and needs of the particular learners in the particular teaching situation. (Breen, 1987b:165)

3.4.4.2.2.1. The procedural syllabus - problems.
The Bangalore Project has received attention from EFL researchers and theorists, due to its being the first example of the TBS in practice, though containing a number of formal and synthetic Type A elements (e.g. the focus on a required outcome, and the role of teachers as controllers and regulators):

An activity which required learners to arrive at an outcome, from given information through some process of thought, and which allowed teachers to control and regulate the process, was regarded as a 'task'. (Prabhu, 1987:24)

Long and Crookes (1993:31) suggest that local cultural and educational norms could have been responsible for various formal aspects of the Bangalore Project such as an emphasis on receptive language, teacher-centred classes, a lack of student-student communication ("because of the fear that learner-learner interaction will promote fossilisation" - Prabhu 1987:82) and the discouragement of group work (cf. Long & Porter [1985] and Pica [1987b] for discussion of the benefits of group work and the opportunities for negotiation provided by appropriate task selection).

Prabhu's recommended lesson structure falls into three sections: i) presentation and demonstration of "pre-tasks" by the teacher in a whole-class format; ii) the task proper, worked on usually individually; iii) feedback from the teacher - regulated and "presented" by the teacher; and is reminiscent of the "three Ps" approach typical of synthetic syllabi. Though largely discredited by SLA theory (White 1988; Skehan 1996a). this three-tiered structure appears ten years later in Willis (1996), who proposes a three-tiered framework for task-based learning in which the teacher still has the overall control (Willis 1996:41). Thus negotiation of syllabus-content, self-direction, and learner-centredness, factors so important in other examples of the process paradigm, are absent from this type of TBS, in which "the teaching techniques required ... are not very different from those of ordinary mainstream language teaching." (Willis 1996:40).

Amongst other criticisms of the Bangalore Project (Brumfit 1984b), the main one has been its failure to build an evaluation component into the design (a criticism rarely made of programmes using synthetic syllabi). Long and Crookes identify other difficulties:

1. the absence of task-based (or any) needs identification leaves no rationale for the content of the syllabus (Long & Crookes 1993:32);
2. grading of task difficulty and sequencing of tasks appear to be arbitrary and left to the teacher. The "half the class doing half the task” criterion (Prabhu 1984:277) is not a satisfactory solution, since it is norm-referenced, and gives no indication of why any one task is "easier" than another (Long & Crookes 1993:32);
3. there is need for incomprehensible input and communication breakdowns if learners are to perceive negative evidence as such in SLA (Bley-Vroman 1986; White 1987);
4. it is important to notice input-output mismatches so that learning can occur (Schmidt 1990a; 1993).

White (1988) also observes that in terms of "empirical demonstration of the effect of organisation and procedures on learning outcomes", there has been no "really concerted effort to evaluate any approach in actual operation" (1988:110), despite the growing body of research into the effects of procedure on language learning in tutored settings (cf. Long 1980; Long & Porter 1985; Aston 1986; Doughty & Pica 1986).  

Continue reading this literature review: "The Task-Based Syllabus"