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.