TAVI
Text As a Vehicle of Information. One of two contrasting stances toward classroom text introduced by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983) at the University of Birmingham in the ESP/EAP reading tradition. In TAVI, the text is treated as a carrier of meaning. It is read or listened to for what it says, not for what it contains. Comprehension is the point; the language is the medium.
Characteristics
- Text choice: driven by the learner's informational purpose, authenticity, and topic relevance. Ideally learner-selected.
- Pre-stage: activate purpose and background knowledge rather than pre-teach vocabulary wholesale.
- Tasks: gist, selective attention, inference, information transfer (diagrams, notes, summaries), comparison with another source.
- Interaction: collaborative meaning-making, note-taking, jigsaw.
- Success criterion: did learners get the message and can they act on it?
Where TAVI fits
TAVI is characteristic of ESP/EAP reading courses, extensive reading programmes, content-based instruction, and CLIL. In skills-lesson staging, it dominates the while-listening and while-reading phases before any language focus takes over. Thornbury's Essential 32 treats the sustained TAVI phase as the part coursebooks most often collapse, rushing to the linguistic work before learners have actually understood the text.
TAVI vs TALO
Johns and Davies framed TAVI as a corrective to a TALO-dominant reading classroom that treated authentic texts as if their only value were the grammar inside them. Their five-way contrast is still a useful audit grid.
| Dimension | TAVI | TALO |
|---|---|---|
| Text selection | Learner purpose | Linguistic content |
| Preparation | Activate purpose | Pre-teach language |
| Work on the text | Whole meaning | Local language points |
| Interaction pattern | Collaborative | Teacher-fronted |
| Follow-up | Real-world use | Comprehension or grammar questions |
See also
- TALO: the contrasting stance
- TASP: the third stance (text as a springboard for production)
- Tim Johns, Florence Davies: the originators
- ESP, EAP: the reading tradition TAVI grew from