This paper focuses on oral tasks that involve the use of material artefacts (e.g., cut-out pictures, objects, etc.) and, more specifically, on the role that teacher-selected artefacts and artefact features play on the students’ interactions as they accomplish these tasks in the English language classroom. It has been observed that, when accomplishing oral activities, students often engage in parallel interaction (Galaczi, 2008) that resembles a series of prompted monologues.

To address this issue, a four-year project involving school teachers and researchers was carried out with the goal of designing oral tasks that promote co-constructed, collaborative interaction in the language classroom. Over the years, tasks have been designed, implemented and revised (Ellis, 2003) through an iterative process of three cycles. So far, findings show that task design affects pupil interaction and, specifically, that brief instructions, the use of artefacts and a problem to be solved are task features that seem to be conducive to a more engaged and collaborative interaction among the participants (Berggren et al., 2019). While there has been a growing interest for research on the students’ interpretation and implementation of task instructions and on their co-constructed interaction during task accomplishment (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017a, 2017b; Kunitz, 2013; Kunitz & Skogmyr Marian, 2017; Lee & Burch, 2017), the role of material artefacts on the ongoing task-oriented interactions has just started to be explored (Burch, 2019).

With our study we intend to fill this gap by relying on the methodological tools afforded by conversation analysis (Sidnell, 2010) to investigate the interactional consequences that the use of specific artefacts might have in six video-recorded task-based interactions between pairs of first year EFL students enrolled in two upper secondary schools in Sweden. The students engaged in a problem-solving task that was designed based on results from previous cycles; the task revolved around the story behind a person found during an excavation with a series of artefacts illustrated by cut-out pictures. The students were instructed to answer the question: “How did this person end up in the cave?”.

Our fine-grained analyses of the ongoing interactions suggest that artefacts play an important role in: (i) the broader sequential organization of the task-based interactions; (ii) the actions accomplished in order to complete the task; and (iii) the affordances for topical talk that they provide. First, the presence of material artefacts leads students to organize their interactions in two phases: an artefact-manipulation phase (in which they explore the artefacts and try to make sense of what they represent) and a narrative-developing phase (in which they produce emergent narratives based on the scenarios suggested by the artefacts). Second, the discussion over the visual ambiguity of some artefacts and over the role of different artefacts on the story behind the excavation involves students in a series of actions such as formulating hypotheses, agreeing, disagreeing, and reaching consensus. Third, similar artefacts seem to engender similar topical talk along the same line of reasoning, while ambiguous-looking artefacts lead students to explore different lines of reasoning.

The findings of this study therefore illustrate the importance of artefacts in task accomplishment and suggest that the selection of artefacts is a crucial aspect of task design. Overall, the study contributes to the literature on task-based instruction and provides relevant insights for task-based instruction.

References 

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017a). Development of L2 interactional resources for online collaborative task accomplishment. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 30(7), 601–630.

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017b). Local contingencies in L2 tasks: A comparison of context-sensitive interactional achievements across two different task types. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 10(3), 9–27.

Berggren, J., Haglind, M., Löfquist, A., Nyström, K., Anfält, H., Finnson, G., Johansson, E., & Rönquist, A. (2019). En språngbräda till bättre undervisning – att använda ett teoretiskt ramverk för att konstruera uppgifter. Lingua, 1/2019, 8–12.

Burch, A.R. (2019, June 11). Pedagogical documents and language partner interaction: The co-accomplishment of how a handout constrains an L2 interaction [Conference presentation]. IPrA, Hong Kong.

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Galaczi, E. (2008). Peer-peer interaction in a speaking test: The case of the First Certificate in English examination. Language Assessment Quarterly, 5(2), 89–119.

Kunitz, S. (2013). Group planning among L2 learners of Italian: A conversation analytic perspective [Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]. IDEALS.

Kunitz, S. & Skogmyr Marian, K. (2017). Tracking immanent language learning behavior over time in task-based classroom work. TESOL Quarterly, 51(3), 507-535.

Lee, J., & Burch, A.R. (2017). Collaborative planning in process: An ethnomethodological perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 51(3), 536–575.

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.