About Tasks, Happiness & Experiential Learning
The following contributions are dedicated to Michael Legutke’s work. They value his innovative ideas in the field of teaching and learning English, his holistic understanding of the language learner, Mitch’s invaluable contributions to the discipline, and last but not least, his outstanding (teacher) personality.
Enjoy the texts written by:
- Wolfgang Hallet
- Michael Schart
- Howard Thomas




MKL’s untimely visionary concepts
Wolfgang Hallet
As is the case with discourses in all societies and cultures, there are also mainstream discourses in and between academic disciplines from which predominant approaches and favoured concepts emerge. These are then negotiated and conventionalized in such a way that they are integrated in the conceptual stock of a discipline and disseminated into all pertinent areas of research and professional practice. In pedagogical disciplines, this discursive process of emergence becomes manifest in a broader spectrum of publications, in curricula, teacher manuals, teacher education syllabi and, of course, in textbooks and classroom practices.
By contrast, there may be conceptual, sometimes paradigmatic interventions from the sideline that are not really well received and taken up by a broader professional audience. There are also always totally marginalized proposals which are, more or less, widely ignored for reasons that cannot really be explained or only become overt much later. All of these different types of contribution to academic discourses and to the profiles of curricula for teacher and school education are co-present in the pertinent disciplinary discourses and available in the relevant respective professional contexts.
It is important to understand these mechanisms of academic discourse (and of all other discourses in the Foucauldian sense) since they explain why individual utterances and contributions do not necessarily alter pre-dominant and hegemonic directions in a discourse community. In any case, it is often difficult or impossible to decide why some concepts are received widely and successfully in a disciplinary community, whereas others are largely silenced or why it may take a decade or two before innovative concepts become productive in a discipline’s theory base.
I would like to argue that such a belated efficacy happened to M.K. Legutke’s (MKL) early approaches to teaching and learning in the language classroom as presented and elaborated in a very systematic and detailed manner in Process and Experience in the Language Classroom, a monograph MKL co-authored and published with Howard Thomas in 1991 (London & New York: Longman). In 2024, readers of this seminal book, researchers and practitioners alike, can still benefit from the approaches developed, presented and explicated there. Three examples may illustrate this: (1) The humanistic educational-theoretical foundation of language learning directs the educators’ attention towards the learner’s individuality, their personality and the unity of cognition and affect all of which are involved in learning processes, and, because of the constant need to establish some sort of contact to others and to express oneself, in language learning in particular. (2) The experience-oriented thematic focus of the language classroom can be regarded as a translation of the humanistic, person-centred concept into the language classroom since it offers learners a space of self-expression, meaningful communication and discursive negotiation. (3) Finally, the task approach as developed and presented in the book by Legutke & Thomas is suited to explain how the abstract concept of humanistic education can be realized practically in the classroom in terms of a methodology.

Fig. 1: The cover of Process and Experience in the Language Classroom (1991)
Humanistic Bildung
The fundamental concept of Bildung as a deeply humanistic endeavour is one on which school education in Germany and in Europe rests. Nowadays, the humanistic foundation of school education becomes manifest in Germany’s constitution, the Grundgesetz, in the constitutions of Germany’s federal states and in their general laws of school education as well as in many of the curricula.
In the study that preceded the introduction of educational standards in Germany (2003), Klieme et al. positioned the individual learner at the centre of all goals of school education:
Pedagogical objectives standardise the relations between individuals and societies. They determine the demands and forms of socialisation and the role of the subjects. For modern societies committed to the tradition of the Enlightenment and organized as democracies, a concept of individuality is therefore regarded as guiding, in which as a basic principle, human dignity and the free development of the individual’s personality are the prime maxims. (Klieme et al., 2003, p. 63; my translation)
The prominent role of ‘human dignity’ and of ‘the individual’s personality’ is evidence that the humanistic concept of Bildung has found its way into and continues to be present in the more recent contexts of school education. However, as easily as the humanistic basis of Bildung may be taken for granted, these days it is more important than ever to insist that this foundation of our democracy needs to be protected and defended, and that a good deal of educators’ and teachers’ awareness is required to protect and defend the humanistic values of our society and its school system.
Humanistic language education
This is why it is remarkable that in 1991 Thomas & Legutke founded their whole theory of language learning on the humanistic concept of Bildung. But what are its implications for the language classroom? In order to translate the quite abstract concept of humanistic education into language education, Legutke & Thomas draw upon the holistic theory of Confluent Education. Directed against exclusively cognitive concepts of learning in a transformative sense, this interdisciplinary theory emphasizes that, apart from the cognitive domain, there is a number of other factors involved when humans beings learn, the affective domain in particular, but also a readiness to learn and an awareness of what it takes to develop further, the responsibility for what is learned and response-ability in terms of individual responses to cognitive challenges (see figure 1). Therefore, it is “a person-centred concept” P. 47):
Confluent Education attempts to take the individuality of each learner seriously and sets out to create a learning environment which is conducive to the individual’s potential for self-exploration and self-expression.” (pp. 47-48)
Learners, in that sense, are not only young persons to be educated, but individuals, personalities and cultural agents in their own right whose experiences, views, interests and talents are always present in the classroom, one way or another.

Fig. 2 Confluent Education (Legutke & Thomas 1991, 46)
The experience-oriented thematic focus
Such a person-centred concept can only be translated into the language classroom if the learners’ experiences and views are taken as starting points and receiving ends. This way, the language classroom turns out to be a space in which young people can share their experiences with others and express themselves, in which they can encounter people from anglophone cultures and their views, and in which, as Claire Kramsch has contended, they can become multilingual subjects who are able to participate in the discourses of other and distant language communities. As Legutke & Thomas point out, this communicative and discourse-oriented view of language learning leads to a functional concept of language in which the purpose and the content of communication define the linguistic devices and items that are applied:
In a communicative task, learners will mobilize their views of the world, their personal values and own experience content. This, in turn, might create new and unforeseen needs for text input, language functions and vocabulary. (p. 61)
The task approach
It is the task, then, in which the humanistic and communicative view of language learning materializes as a “learner-centred methodology.” (p. 150) In that sense, the language classroom is not really language-centred: “It is not a set of linguistic aims which determines the process of the action” (p. 151), and language “is not the aim of the lesson but a means towards communication between people.” (p. 151) In other words: In Legutke’s & Thomas’s task approach, the focus is on human beings and on learners as communicative individuals and personalities. This focus of a book from 1991 is worth remembering. The task-approach is now an established methodology, but more often than not it turns out to be a classroom technique to be taught in teacher education rather than a humanistic endeavour in which teachers and learners engage: Tasks are designed for young people in our school classrooms in order to create spaces in which individuals can express themselves and exchange experiences, emotions, ways of thinking and visions. No wonder, then, that in the 1991 book the task-approach is expanded into project and scenario learning so that tasks can be seen as “project starting points which provide a framework and are […] open-ended in that they offer space for learners to exploit.” (p. 290)
Protracted implementation and lasting impact
These are just three examples of the protracted implementation of innovative concepts in the discourses of the professional communities of language education. There are more of these in MKL’s work, like the constitution of the classroom space which, in 2024, is still waiting to become an integral part of school building architecture, or the establishment of teacher-led research which is only gradually finding its way into teacher education. Other approaches of his had lasting impact, like the focus on theme-centred interaction in the language classroom or the strategies of teacher-education which MKL developed in world-wide programmes for teachers of German as a Foreign Language. The observation of the diverging resonance of MKL’s concepts and proposals refers the professional community to the need of constantly revisiting and re-considering approaches that have been around for a long time in order to decide whether it is high time they become part of the professional knowledge base or whether, maybe, they are to be developed further to adapt them to new cultural, social or medial conditions of language education.
Probably, the simultaneity of different stages of the conceptual development of language teaching and learning is all too typical. In a sense, the cover of the book illustrates this (see figure 1): The classroom situation that is depicted there represents the simultaneity of three different media ages: the blackboard, the overhead projector and the personal computer are all co-present in this classroom of 1991, all of them connected to different pedagogical approaches and concepts.
Wolfgang Hallet
Von einem kleinen Unterschied, der einen bedeutsamen Unterschied macht
Michael Schart
In den Diskussionen um die Rolle von Aufgaben im Fremdsprachenunterricht kommt es immer wieder zu Verwirrungen, weil die Begriffe „aufgabenorientiert“ und „aufgabenbasiert“ in verschiedenen Bedeutungsvarianten benutzt werden. Manche betrachten sie als Synonyme, andere können zumindest Bedeutungsnuancen zwischen ihnen erkennen. Wer jedoch selbst schon einmal konsequent aufgabenbasierten Unterricht erlebt hat, ob lehrend oder lernend, weiß sehr genau, dass dieser kleine Unterschied in den Begriffen auf extreme Gegensätze im didaktischen Denken verweisen kann. Es geht demnach um weitaus mehr als eine akademische Wortspielerei oder eine geringfügige Differenzierung auf der Ebene von Unterrichtstechniken.
Aufgabenbasierung steht für eine Idee des Lehrens und Lernens von Fremdsprachen, die vieles von dem in Frage stellt, was sich als lehrwerkgestützter „kommunikativer Unterricht“ in den letzten Jahrzehnten zur Standardversion der Fremdsprachendidaktik entwickelte. Die Annahme beispielsweise, dass Lernende zunächst isolierte sprachliche Phänomene intensiv einüben müssten, bevor sie in der Lage sind, komplexe Äußerungen zu bewältigen. Die Vermutung, dass ihnen auf den unteren Niveaustufen keine anspruchsvollen Themen zugetraut werden könnten. Oder die Vorstellung, sprachliche Lernprozesse ließen sich durch Lehrmaterial vorstrukturieren – und das bis in den Erwerb des Wortschatzes hinein.
In aufgabenbasierten Lehr- und Lernsettings wird mit solchen grundlegenden Prinzipien lehrwerkgestützten Unterrichtens rigoros gebrochen. Das wird leicht als Provokation des eigenen didaktischen Denkens erfahren. So wie bei der Studentin aus einem MA-Studiengang für Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache, die in folgendem Zitat auf ihre ersten Erfahrungen als Lehrerin mit aufgabenbasiertem Unterricht zurückblickt:
„Ich weiß noch, wie ich das am Anfang gar nicht verstanden habe. Weil auf A2 da kann man doch nicht über so Sachen sprechen (wie das Thema „Identität“). Die können doch die Verben nicht konjugieren. (…) Ich weiß noch, wie ich gedacht habe, nein, was ihr jetzt macht, das geht so nicht. Und das ist so schön, wenn man bemerkt: Doch, das kann man!“ (Diana, FSU Jena)
In dieser Äußerung klingen Verunsicherung und Zweifel an, aber zugleich wird auch deutlich, worin das Besondere des aufgabenbasierten Unterrichts liegt. Er hat das Potenzial, Lehrenden wie Lernenden jene Glücksmomente zu bescheren, die in Lernräumen eigentlich alltäglich sein sollten. Da ist zum Beispiel das Gefühl, sich schon nach wenigen Stunden des Unterrichts selbstbestimmt, kreativ und bedeutungsvoll in einer neuen Fremdsprache ausdrücken zu können. Da ist die motivierende Erfahrung, als Individuum ernst genommen zu werden. Und das ist die überraschende Erkenntnis, dass man gemeinsam mit anderen Lösungen erarbeiten kann oder sich Sichtweisen erschließen, auf die man allein nur schwer gekommen wäre. Ein Fremdsprachenunterricht, der aus den Aufgaben seine Triebkraft gewinnt, begünstigt jene Flow-Momente, von denen Csíkszentmihályi schreibt.
Dabei liegt das Besondere des aufgabenbasierten Unterrichts eigentlich nicht in der Gestaltung einzelner Aufgaben. Es handelt sich zumeist um weit verbreitete Techniken, die auch von Lehrwerken gerne genutzt werden. Das innovative Moment dieses Unterrichts ergibt sich daher nicht aus einer zusammenhangslosen Abfolge von Aufgaben. Auch sehr kreativ und anregend wirkende Impulse können zu frustrierenden Aktivitäten führen, wenn sie nicht zugleich von den Lernenden als sinnvoll bzw. kohärent, herausfordernd, abwechslungsreich und motivierend empfunden werden. Es kommt beim aufgabenbasierten Unterricht – anders als es die Bezeichnung suggeriert – demnach keineswegs vor allem auf die Aufgabenstellungen an. Ohne eine Verknüpfung mit attraktiven Inhalten einerseits und einer auf dialogisches Lernen zielenden Interaktion andererseits kann dieser Ansatz sein Potenzial nicht entfalten. Erst durch das Zusammenspiel dieser drei zentralen Aspekte des didaktischen Designs wird es möglich, die oft kritisierte Künstlichkeit des Austauschs im Fremdsprachenunterricht zu überwinden. Die Begegnung mit komplexen Materialien eröffnet Lernenden die Chance, eigene Lernwege zu erschließen und animiert sie dazu, ihre „intuitiven Heuristiken“ (Kumaravadivelu) zu aktivieren. Aufgabenbasierter Unterricht zielt auf das Lernpotenzial, das von Irritationen und vom „produktiven Scheitern“ (Sinha/ Kapur) ausgeht.
Es liegt auf der Hand, dass dieses Konzept von Fremdsprachenunterricht ebenso leicht mit curricularen Zwängen in Konflikt gerät wie mit zählebigen Vorstellungen darüber, auf welche Weise Unterricht abzulaufen habe, was den „Schülerjob“ (Breidenstein) ausmacht und welche Rolle Lehrende in Klassenräumen spielen sollten. Vor diesem Hintergrund kann es nicht überraschen, dass die Idee der Aufgabenbasierung häufig zu einer Unterrichtstechnik verschrumpft wird. Van den Brandens Frage, ob dieser didaktische Ansatz möglicherweise nur auf dem Papier funktioniere, ist daher naheliegend. Dagegen sprechen jedoch empirische Studien zu aufgabenbasierten Programmen. Sie zeigen, dass diese Form des Lehrens und Lernens einer Fremdsprache funktionieren kann, wenn die Kontextbedingungen es erlauben, wenn alle Beteiligten bereit sind, sich auf dieses Abenteuer einzulassen, und wenn kontextsensible Lösungen gefunden werden.
In diesen Punkten jedoch unterscheidet sich aufgabenbasierter Unterricht in keiner Weise von anderen Ansätzen der Fremdsprachendidaktik. Gewiss erfordern die ersten Schritte etwas mehr Beherztheit, weil man viele vermeidliche Gewissheiten über das Lehren und Lernen in Klassenzimmern hinter sich lassen muss. Den Zweifelnden und Zögerlichen sei die Lektüre von Michael Legutkes Arbeiten ans Herz gelegt. Sie führen nicht nur sehr anschaulich vor Augen, wie umfassend das Gestaltungspotenzial ist, das von Aufgaben ausgeht. Darüber hinaus ermutigen seine Texte dazu, unkonventionell zu denken und Neues zu versuchen. Sie strahlen Inspiration und Zuversicht aus, ohne dabei den kritischen Blick auf das Mögliche und Notwendige zu vernachlässigen oder sich im Visionären zu verlieren. Es braucht genau diese Balance im didaktischen Denken, um den aufgabenbasierten Unterricht erfolgreich umsetzen zu können. Michael Legutkes Arbeiten zeigen uns, wie wir diese Ausgewogenheit erreichen können.
Michael Schart
Mitch and his contribution to language teaching. A brief personal view.
Howard Thomas
Mitch and his contribution to language teaching.
A brief personal view.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday it should be possible to sum up Mitch’s unique role within language teaching but in a sense it is still too early because he seems to be as active as ever and the spread of his influence continues to widen. I first met him in the early 1980s at HILF, the Hessisches Institut für Lehrerfortbildung, that major centre for innovation in European language teaching, when Christoff Edelhoff introduced us as having a lot in common professionally. In doing so he had in mind Mitch’s successes in creating language learning projects at his comprehensive school in Frankfurt and our work on projects at the Bell Educational Trust, a private language school in Bath, UK. At the time he was completing his PhD on ways in which language teaching could change its paradigm from a transmission based approach to a learner-centred, experiential approach and we agreed in the next few years to bring together the weight of his PhD with the practical data from my own background in Bath in the form of a book for teachers and researchers.
It was a heady and invigorating time for those interested in change in language teaching. Much was happening in the USA through figures such as Canale and Swain and in the UK through the powerhouse that was the Dept of Applied Linguistics at Lancaster, headed by Chris Candlin and supported by Mike Breen and Dick Allwright, all of which was ably supported by Christoff Edelhoff through the network of HILF and the Inlingua Programme funded by Brussels. Their contributions were further complemented by colleagues all over the world too numerous to mention here. What we were witnessing was both the creation of the intellectual foundations of what we now call Communicative Language Teaching and the commensurate stampede to realise it in classrooms. Few if any commentators were able to embrace both strands. However Mitch was the exception, emphasising from the beginning of his work that language teaching is foremost an educational endeavour, referring to Dewey, Cohn and others to show that learning is not just the learning of knowledge or acquiring a skill but an opportunity for self development and understanding. On the other side while many in the profession, fuelled by the voracious appetite of textbook publishers, sought to develop ‘add-on’ activities to insert into the traditional transmission-based classroom, Mitch was more interested in solving what he deemed to be ‘the central methodological challenge, for both teacher and student, (which consisted of) creating the learning space within which (natural and spontaneous) interaction (could) unfold”.
His early answer to this problem was the project ‘Airport’ which he developed with Wolfgang Thiel, the WDR film of which remains even today as inspirational, exciting and revolutionary as when it was made decades ago. As a WDR cameraman commented during the filming, “I wish I could have learned English like this!” The project enabled learners to learn language for use in a live setting, determining beforehand what language they needed to conduct interviews at the airport, with the teacher acting as a facilitator rather than a central directing figure. It was a highly motivating and effective way of introducing the real world into the curriculum. Of course it was clear that the language teaching world could not change at a stroke, or that textbooks were suddenly redundant, but ’Airport’ lit up the way ahead for what could be achieved with imagination and a belief in learner development.
More than anything it gave clarity and shape to what has become known as task based learning. In the many years that have folllowed, Mitch and others from the HILF-influenced CLT network have given countless workshops at IATEFL and TESOL conferences, exploring and demonstrating how learners can be involved in developing their own learning agenda. Our own collaboration, and a favourite of mine, led us to give workshops using literary or creative texts in the target language, which helped learners understand that they too can become producers of valuable and viable texts of their own in their L2. Our work at this time led us also to re-examine the concept of communicative competence and one of Mitch’s key contributions was to expand this construct to include much needed references to both ‘process competence’, which allows for reflection of how learners manage their own learning, and also ‘intercultural competence’ which recognises that language learning is also an exchange between at least two cultures, and learning to interpret and negotiate such differences also belongs in what it means to learn a language.
The wider intellectual debate within language teaching has always suffered on the international stage from the dominance of the English speaking world to the exclusion of contributions from colleagues operating outside the realm of English. In the USA he acted as a much needed bridge between North American and UK research and the rest of the non English speaking world. The opportunity to become known in the USA was boosted by his taking on the role as German Language Advisor on behalf of the German government in the Pacific North West. It also helped him to engage with the issues involved with teaching of German as a Foreign Language (DAF) and in particular the task of developing inservice training of teachers for DAF, a counterbalance to his work in TEFL at HILF, and a role he continues to this day in his major work for the Goethe Institut worldwide.
His time in Seattle also saw the completion of our book, ‘Process and Experience in the Language Classroom,’ which owed much to Mitch’s kindness, patience and negotiating skill in persuading me to spend time with him in Seattle to jointly revisit the book’s structure and clarify our way forward. It was a hugely rewarding experience, overcoming any doubts I had, and after two weeks of very intensive work, much of the book was drafted and sent off to the editor. Our aim was to give the reader the rationale and a practical view of what language teaching could look like and, more strategically, suggesting what the future of teacher training could look like. And it is in this latter capacity that I feel his his legacy may have the most influence. Although he was not alone in the view that teachers were most influenced by their own experiences as learners as children, he was fundamentally convinced that the way to prevent new teachers becoming clones of their own teachers was to expose them to and immerse them in an experiential form of teacher training. What he needed was a context in which he could realise this ambition.
The context arrived when he was appointed a few years later to a Professorship at Justus Liebig University in Giessen to take over the chair that was once occupied by Hans-Eberhard Piepho, himself a legendary and innovative supporter of classroom language teaching. It was as if the stars were aligning correctly for once in the language teaching sky, and it is an opportunity that Mitch has grasped fully. An indefatigable researcher, a propagator of the learner centred classroom, the author of countless books, papers and conference presentations, he has invested his time and commitment most of all into the classroom teachers of the future, as those who have had the good fortune to study under his guidance will attest. In his training of teachers and future researchers he has created a new paradigm for the development of teachers for the communicative classroom and in doing so, has remained par excellence a great facilitator, a role model for those moving on, post graduation, into schools to build their own communicative classrooms.
Early on in our friendship we discussed from time to to time the kind of qualities that a good teacher should have. While we could easily identify from our data the roles that teachers could and maybe should adopt, we concluded that there was a less clearly defined ‘X’ factor, which was probably different from teacher to teacher. But whatever that was, it was manifest in the way that students responded to their teachers and recognisable in the chemistry between the teacher and the students; that is, they could spot very quickly whether a teacher not only liked being with them but made every effort to help them in their efforts to learn, or not. It is this rapport between Mitch and his students, and also between Mitch and his colleagues, which is very recognisable to any visitor to his seminars at Giessen.
The worlds of TEFL, DAF and Applied Linguistics have been indeed fortunate to have the benefit of Mitch’s vision, his intellectual grasp, his focus on where real educational value lies, his energy to deliver on projects and his engaging personality which supports all those who work with him. May he continue to share his time with his family and friends, his garden, and the profession which still needs him.
Howard Thomas
07.08.24