As Mike Long suggests, “a task is a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some reward; or in others words by task is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between”. Tasks are essential in task-based language teaching. Now, I would like to illustrate the components tasks have and how each one of them works, and specially why they are so necessary and important.

Task components are defined as the elements that conform a task. There are three central elements that minimally should exist: goals, input data, and procedures; and two others: the roles that teachers and learners play, and settings.

In the case of providing students with a schedule for them to complete with the things they are going to do during a week and have them role-play a conversation, we can analyze the task components present here. The goal can be “to encourage students to exchange information about them”, this is the intention behind the task. The input data would be the schedule, for this is the material they will be using to complete the task. Students would have to complete the schedule first and afterwards talk to each other about it,. tThese are the procedures or steps to carry out the task. The role of the teacher would be to explain the task, while the learners would be playing the roles of interactors and negotiators who are capable of giving as well as taking. And finally the settings or the context in which learning would take place would be athe classroom where students are sitting.

In conclussion, meaningful tasks are relevant to the process of learning and they must have all the components to achieve real results.