The advocacy of task-based language teaching (TBLT) has met with resistance. The critiques of TBLT and the misconceptions that underlie them have already been addressed in Ellis (2009) and Long (2016). The purpose of this article is to move forward by examining a number of real problems that TBLT faces--such as how a "task" should be…

This special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal", guest edited by Silvina Montrul, unites four papers on different aspects of heritage Spanish speakers' linguistic abilities. In this commentary, we reexamine these important contributions with an eye toward implications for instruction and toward general trends for the field. In particular, we…

This paper is a short tutorial in formal grammar with speculative examples of how it could be used as a research tool for task analysis, the description of lesson structure, the modeling of interactive dialogue, and perhaps the instructional design process. Gagne's notion of "events of instruction" is used in an example of the…

This article first addresses the question of what tasks are. It suggests that rather than accept the common "communicative" definition, we should return to a broader definition and then focus on key dimensions that distinguish (from the learner's perspective) different types of task, notably degrees of task involvement and degrees of focus on form…

Examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in the second language literature to determine notions of grammaticality of nonnative speakers. Native speakers of French and second language learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject-verb agreement, and…