14. Prabhu's Procedural Syllabus
N.S.Prabhu's Bangalore Project as described in his papers, and, most recently, his book, may be compared to the English Block project.
His classes were in mother-tongue medium schools - that is, English was not the medium of instruction - and included various levels of learners.
His basic assumption was the same as that of the English Block:

that language structure is best acquired when the learner's attention is on meaning - when, that is to say, the learner is preoccupied with understanding, working out, relating or conveying messages, and copes, in the process, as well as he can with the language involved... There is therefore no syllabus in terms of vocabulary or structure, no pre-selection of language-items for any given lesson or activity and no stage in the lesson when language-items are practiced or sentence-production as such was demanded.19

All these could be equally said of the English Block. For Prabhu

The basis of each lesson is a problem or a task, and the conduct of the lesson consists of setting the task, demonstrating ways of tackling it and in the process giving some pupils a chance to attempt it and finally giving each pupil a rough indication of the measure of his or her success. (Ibid.)

What makes the difference is that Prabhu gives a much more active role to the teacher in initiating pupil activity. He still makes the unit of activity the lesson. Also he does not use groups. The pupils thus communicate mainly with the teacher rather than with each other. This may well be the right response to the conditions in the schools he was operating in. That is, if pupils are closer to being beginners it is less appropriate to have them communicate with each other before they have enough ability to do so.

The strongest argument for systematic groupwork in task-based teaching would be that it will generate spontaneous interaction between members of a group, creating opportunities for the deployment of their emerging internal systems. But deployment, as noted above, is a process during which learners' internal systems get firmed up (in production as well as in comprehension) and revised or extended (in comprehension).20

The danger there is that when people try to communicate before they have a large enough repertoire they may entrench deviant forms and not learn new correct ones. (This seems to be the meaning of Prabhu's explanation (above) for not using Groupwork in his Second Language Pedagogy.) The sheer difficulty of communicating with too small a command of the language may create frustration rather than the relaxed concentration on meaning which both Prabhu and the English Block were trying to achieve.
Another condition which tends to favour teacher-controlled learning is the absence of other sources of language, such as books,

tapes, videos and other English-speakers. This is likely to be the condition in Prabhu's Indian schools. If the teacher has to be the only source of pupils' language he had better be around and talking as much as possible.
However, if there are plenty of sources of language, as there were in the English Block, Prabhu's objection to the use of groups falls away. Our experience was that his fears of the entrenchment of deviant forms are not justified, as on the contrary they tended to disappear without explicit teaching. In modern conditions, but not perhaps in rural India, video and other recorded language can provide many more sources than we had. The tasks required of the students in the English Block were in Prabhu's sense challenges. Success consisted in such things as producing a publication which attracted praise. The former students clearly remember (see Research section) the discussion of the group work and the working out of meaning through reading as having been valuable.His view is that the learner develops "a system" - an internal working model of the language at a sub-conscious level and that as part of the effort to understand meaning he continually tests this against the language he hears and sees. This seems not unreasonable, though like Krashen's theories (or anyone else's) it cannot be tested. The unconscious is after all and by definition that part of the human mind not directly accessible to conscious thought.

My feeling is that Prabhu's work is to be welcomed, as any attempt to break the common pattern of grammar-based lessons is worth supporting. Whether his (or anyone else's) theory can ever be more than a speculation is another matter. Krashen, because he writes less opaquely, is bound to be more widely read than Prabhu, again whether his theory is truer or not. The English Block is here justified as a method that produced learning with very little explicit teaching - an example of empiricism which does not need a particular systematic theory of learning to explain it. The truth seems to be that several different methods of organising learning "work" in the sense of helping to learn to use a language. Experimental evidence on teaching has a tendency to be difficult to interpret - as may be noted from Beretta and Davies's report (printed as Appendix VI in Second Language Pedagogy) which concludes that

The impossibility of full experimental control, and the potential for bias in test construction make generalisation impossible. Also, the fact that no group of learners has been exposed to CTP treatment for more than three years precludes any firm statement about the effectiveness of this method at later stages of learning. While admitting these limitations, we regard the results as being, on the whole, positive and conclude that grammar construction can take place through a focus on meaning alone.(Ibid. p.151)

In the case of the English Block no firmer "scientific" case could have been made out at the time. As a historical study, which this dissertation must be, only the recollections of the participants can now be recorded.

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19N.S.Prabhu Procedural Syllabuses ESP 5A/9
20N.S.Prabhu Second Language Pedagogy (OUP)1987 p 81.