Procedural Syllabus
A syllabus whose units are meaning-focused tasks rather than linguistic items. Learners work on problems whose solution requires comprehension and production in the target language; grammar and vocabulary develop as by-products of the effort to mean.
Origin
The procedural syllabus emerged from the Communicational Teaching Project run by N.S. Prabhu in primary and middle schools in Bangalore and Madras between 1979 and 1984. The project was a deliberate departure from the structural syllabus of Indian state schooling and an equally deliberate refusal of the notional-functional syllabus then ascendant in Europe — Prabhu judged that the problem with structural teaching was methodological, not a matter of swapping one specification for another. He set out the rationale and findings in Second Language Pedagogy (Oxford University Press, 1987).
Design Features
The syllabus contains no list of grammatical structures, functions, or notions. It contains tasks. Prabhu (1987) classified them into three broad types:
- Information-gap tasks, requiring transfer of given information from one party to another (for example, completing a partially filled timetable).
- Reasoning-gap tasks, requiring derivation of new information through inference, deduction, or calculation.
- Opinion-gap tasks, requiring identification or articulation of a personal preference, feeling, or attitude.
Sequencing is by perceived cognitive difficulty rather than linguistic complexity. The teacher leads the class through a pre-task version, then learners attempt the task itself with feedback on success rather than form. The assumption — drawn from Krashen-era input hypotheses but pushed further — is that a focus on meaning under appropriate cognitive demand drives acquisition more reliably than focus on form.
Relation to TBLT
The procedural syllabus is the most direct precursor of TBLT. Michael Long's 1985 paper "A role for instruction in second language acquisition: task-based language teaching" cited Prabhu as the operational starting point while diverging on key details: Long retained focus on form within tasks, where Prabhu rejected it. Later TBLT designers (Nunan, Ellis, Skehan) inherited the Bangalore commitment to tasks as syllabus units while building back in the linguistic specification Prabhu had stripped out.
Critiques
The Bangalore Project was evaluated by Beretta and Davies (1985) with mixed results: students on the procedural syllabus performed comparably to control groups on structure-focused measures and slightly better on task-based ones. Critics including Brumfit and Greenwood questioned the replicability of a syllabus that depends so heavily on teacher craft and that resists pre-specification, the very feature Prabhu treated as a virtue.
References
- Prabhu, N. S. (1987). Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford University Press.
- Long, M. H. (1985). A role for instruction in second language acquisition: task-based language teaching. In K. Hyltenstam and M. Pienemann (eds.), Modelling and Assessing Second Language Acquisition (pp. 77–99). Multilingual Matters.
- Beretta, A., and Davies, A. (1985). Evaluation of the Bangalore Project. ELT Journal 39(2), 121–127.