TASP

Text As a Springboard for Production. A third stance toward classroom text, commonly attributed to Lindsay Clandfield's British Council TeachingEnglish article, which extends the original TAVI / TALO pair introduced by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983). In TASP, the text is treated as a stimulus for a subsequent productive task (discussion, debate, letter, essay, presentation). Its content, structure, or voice seeds what the learner then produces.

Characteristics

• Text choice: rich enough in ideas, structure, or voice to provoke a learner response.
• Pre-stage: orient learners to the downstream production task, not the text alone.
• Tasks: debate the writer's position, write a reply, adapt the genre to a new topic, role-play a situation raised in the text.
• Interaction: pair and group discussion, collaborative writing, peer response.
• Success criterion: quality of the learner's production, not recall of the source.

Where TASP fits

TASP aligns naturally with Communicative Language Teaching and with genre-based writing instruction. A common sequence is TAVI → TALO → TASP: learners first understand the text, then analyse its language or genre features, then produce a parallel or responsive text of their own. In listening lessons, TASP often appears as the post-listening productive task (speaking or writing) that builds on the content just understood.

Relationship to TAVI and TALO

Stance	Text treated as...	Primary purpose
TAVI	Carrier of meaning	Comprehension
TALO	Specimen of language	Language analysis
TASP	Stimulus for production	Productive output

TASP depends on the other two. A text read only to be produced from (without comprehension or language attention) tends to generate shallow output; a text analysed in TALO terms without a productive follow-up stays an academic exercise.

References

• Clandfield, L. Text in language classrooms: TALO, TAVI and TASP. British Council TeachingEnglish.
• Johns, T. & Davies, F. (1983). Text as a vehicle for information: The classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1(1), 1–19.