This paper focuses on the role that material artifacts play on students’ task-based interactions in the EFL classroom. While conversation-analytic research has focused on students’ implementation of tasks as observable activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017; Kunitz & Skogmyr Marian, 2017; Lee & Burch, 2017), the role of artifacts on the ongoing task- oriented interactions has just started to be explored (Burch, 2019; Kunitz et al., 2022). Our conversation-analytic study aims to fill this gap by investigating the interactional consequences that the use of specific artifacts might have in six videorecorded task-based interactions between pairs of first-year EFL students. The students were presented with the scenario of a person found during an excavation with various items (illustrated by cut-out pictures). Our fine-grained analyses suggest that artifacts play an important role in: (i) the broader sequential organization of their task-based interaction; and (ii) the actions-in- interaction accomplished in order to complete the task. After an initial artifact-manipulation phase, the students co-constructed emergent narratives based on the scenarios suggested by the artifacts. The discussion over the visual ambiguity and the role of different artifacts on the story behind the excavation involved students in actions-in-interaction such as formulating hypotheses, agreeing, and disagreeing. The findings of this study therefore illustrate the importance of artifacts in task accomplishment and suggest that the selection of artifacts is a crucial aspect of task design that aims to elicit co-constructed, collaborative interaction. 

References

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017). 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.

Burch, A.R. (2019) Pedagogical Documents and Language Partner Interaction: The Co-accomplishment of how a Handout Constrains an L2 Interaction. Paper presented at International PragmaticsAssociation (IPrA): Hong Kong

Kunitz, S., Berggren, J., Haglind, M., & Löfquist, A. (2022). Getting students to talk: A practice-based study on the design and implementation of problem-solving tasks in the EFL classroom. Languages. 

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. 536-570.