Amanda Hoskins

PhD student

I study EFL students' task-based interactions and how these are affected by the design of speaking tasks

Designing and accomplishing interactive speaking tasks in the English-as-a-Foreign-Language Classroom

My dissertation addresses the pedagogical practice-based issue of parallel interactions, i.e. monologues or interview-like structures such as question-response sequences often found in students’ accomplishment of oral tasks. Findings show that task design affects the students' interaction, creating affordances for collaborative interaction and the development of interactional competence.

I am interested in how the design of speaking tasks affects EFL students' interaction during task accomplishment. More specifically, my research focuses on the social actions generated by the tasks and how different variables of task design affect the ongoing interaction. Central to my research focus is the role of material objects used in the speaking tasks, for example, instruction cards, cut-out pictures and various physical objects. My data show that these material objects are used by the students as a resource for task-based interaction.

The data collection comprises video recordings of dyadic task-based interactions between students of English 5 (upper secondary school) analysed through multimodal conversation analysis.

Publications

2022

2021

2020

CV

Academic Background

I have a degree of Master of Arts in Education (upper secondary school) from Linköping Universitet (2015). My subjects are English and Spanish. I have also studied Linguistics and Language Pedagogy (MA) at Stockholm University.

I have worked as a qualified teacher since 2014.

I participated in the research project From Monologues to Dialogues as part of Stockholm Teaching and Learning Studies (STLS) between 2019 and 2022. I also worked as a project assistant at Karlstad University in 2021. It was a pilot project on storytelling and assessment in High-Stake Tests.

Teaching

I teach English in courses offered by the English Department at IKOS. I also supervise term papers.

Other Commitments

Research Environment

Le mur des je t'aime. Place des Abbesses, Paris. By Britchi Mirela [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.

The Language and Culture research environment

The Language and Culture research environment is a meeting place for linguistic and literary research in a cultural context.

Interactional linguistics and conversation analysis

Research on conversation and interaction has been a highly regarded profile at Linköping university for several decades. We work with audio- or video-recorded data in order to understand human interaction.

Supervisors

Nigel John Musk

Senior Associate Professor

Silvia Kunitz

Associate Professor

Michael Smith

Associate Professor

Organisation

Department of Culture and Society (IKOS)

At the Department of Culture and Society (IKOS), social sciences and the humanities gather in environments where research and education work together.

Division of Language, Culture and Interaction (SKI)

The department includes professional languages, English as well as research and teaching in the field of interaction studies.