ABSTRACT
Texts are frozen records of someone else's prior task accomplishment. In language teaching materials, such texts are often written in a very different form from those that learners will encounter in real chemistry textbooks or professional journals. Tasks are also meaningful and motivational units from the students' perspective. They lend themselves to courses characterized by problem solving and learning by doing. The advantage of tasks over texts is especially obvious for advanced adult learners, whose needs are usually fairly easily identified in terms of target tasks. A number of problems arise when task is selected as the unit of analysis, one of which is sequencing. This issue arises, of course, but is rarely addressed scientifically, regardless of the kind of syllabus used. Students are exposed to, and create, relevant samples of target language discourse when those are natural components, or products, of doing pedagogic tasks.
