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.