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Alan Maley, N.S. Prabhu 1933–2024, ELT Journal, Volume 79, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 127–128, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccae057
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Extract
The ELT world has lost one of its outstanding professionals. N.S. Prabhu was an iconic figure and will be greatly missed.
He is best-known for his Bangalore Project (1979–1984), which first opened the way for Task-based Learning (TBL). In setting up this project, he was in fact challenging the status quo of English Language Teaching in India at the time. The dominant paradigm was the Structural/Situational approach, which operated on the basis of a carefully graded syllabus of structural items and restricted vocabulary. The basic assumption was that learning outcomes were predictable and learners were assumed to learn what teachers taught. By contrast, Prabhu argued that teaching and learning were not necessarily reciprocal processes, as the titles of some of his provocative articles suggest. For example, ‘Coping with the Unknown in Language Pedagogy’ (Prabhu and Durairajan 2019: 45–58) and ‘Teaching is at Most Hoping for the Best’ (Prabhu and Durairajan 2019: 241–52). He also asserted that by engaging learners in problem-solving tasks, they would be acquiring the language incidentally while their conscious attention was actively focussed on cognitively demanding tasks. But he was no armchair theoretician, and put his ideas to the test by working for five years with a number of primary and middle schools in Bangalore (Karnataka State, South India), experimenting with the use of tasks and developing what he termed a Communicational Syllabus. His account of the experiment along with his theoretical framework was then published in Language Teaching Pedagogy (Prabhu 1987). Others have adopted TBL and taken it further, but he can justifiably be considered the godfather of TBL. The engagement produced by his approach can also be seen as a precursor to later ideas, such as Dogme and the Emergent Language movement.
