Theme: Speaking as an interactive process Table of content

b) Interview tasks:
Interviews can encourage students to share personal information of different kinds. This includes: anecdotes (talking about terrible accidents), personal reminiscences (talking about past regrets of doing or not doing something), attitudes, opinions, preferences (talking about favorite places to go) and personal reactions (what makes you annoyed/ stressed/ happy and so on) (Martin, 1997). Interviews encourage students to use the necessary question-and-answer structures. With advanced learners, language functions like asking for confirmation (Did you mean that ...? Do you really think that...?) hesitating (well, let me see ...), contradicting and interrupting (hold on a minute) can be practiced as well (Dinapoli, 2000).
Reviewing the previous task classifications, it becomes evident that some of them categorize tasks according to their purpose or according to the distribution of information among participants. Others consider how much freedom of turn taking and negotiation learners are allowed. However, what is obvious in all these classifications is the general overlap between different types of tasks; most of the previously explained tasks can fall under more than one category (O' Brein, 1996).

Pedagogical proposals of tackling tasks:

Approaches to instruction which make meaning primary, such as communicative tasks, obviously have considerable appeal in terms of authenticity and linkage with acquisitional accounts of language development. However, there are pitfalls with such approaches, generally stemming from the consequences of putting such an emphasis on meaning (Skehan, 1998: 40). The pitfalls are identified as follows: 64 ˆ They over-emphasize communication, which increases the risk of a greater reliance on lexical-based language, strategic behavior and elliptical language. These lexicalized items may become resistant to change and analysis which may lead to fossilization. This implies that foreign language development and foreign language use may enter into some degree of mutual tension since the priorities of real-time language use may distract attention from noticing forms (Yule and Macdonald, 1992). ˆ There is no easy means of assuring systematic language development. The reliance is always on negotiation of meaning. The outcome of this negotiation is a conversational behavior, which can be described, as essentially local in character and lacks long terms effect. As a result, it may not be possible to rely on tasks to automatically drive language development (interlanguage) forward (Ellis, 2003). ˆ There is little clear connection with a broader theory about second/foreign language acquisition, and the role of noticing, acquisitional sequence, information processing, and so on. As a result, there is insufficient connection with the nature of interlanguage development. This brings us to a final criticism that there is insufficient detail as to how plans can be made and systematic teaching arranged (Skehan, 2002: 291). Hence, the challenge of using tasks is to contrive sufficient focus on form to enable interlanguage development to proceed without decreasing the naturalness of the communication that tasks can generate. To realize this goal, the main issues addressed by all traditional pedagogic endeavors focused on how tasks are selected and implemented to maximize chances of focus on form. Prabhu (1987), in this context, advocates the use of per-task activities to sensitize the need for language form. More resent proposals on task-based instruction have shared a preoccupation with the importance of the form-meaning relationship, and accept that this relationship is problematic. Loschky and Bley-Verman (1993), for example, distinguish between three structure-to-task relationships: