In this talk I report on an action research study into how a Japanese language teacher experienced the transition from structure-based instruction to teaching with tasks. The study was situated in a course for beginner learners of Japanese at a university in New Zealand. I, the teacher-researcher, collected data on the experience of planning and teaching with tasks each week over ten weeks of a 12-week course. Weekly data included the teacher’s reflective journals, student survey data collected after each class, focus group data, and audio recordings of task-based interactions in class. Data from these sources was synthesised and analysed as narratives and presented as retrospective weekly stories. The paper reports on data from weeks 3 and 4 and focuses on the ways in which the teacher and students made sense of the task feature of learners needing to rely mainly on their own linguistic and non-linguistic resources, a task feature that is often perceived most difficult to put into practice by language teachers. Findings show how the teacher underestimated the students’ resilience and willingness to ‘have a go’ at performing challenging communicative tasks and the insights and strategies the teacher developed through the research.