Low-Proficiency Learners and Task-Based Language Teaching

We can only hazard a guess at how many language learners worldwide might be defined as low-proficiency learners (LPLs). But given that the overall number of language learners can be counted not in millions but in billions¹, we can be confident that LPLs make up a substantial proportion of this number. Not surprisingly then, there is no shortage of instructional guidance for teaching LPLs in the general language teaching literature. However, this group, despite its size, has until recently been poorly served in task-based language teaching (TBLT) research and by those who advocate for teaching with tasks. In this chapter