Collaborative talk in EFL speaking tasks
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper focuses on how secondary students of English as a foreign language (EFL) carry out speaking tasks. In line with communicative language teaching, speaking tasks are commonly designed to get students talking (e.g., discussing, brainstorming). However, the talk itself is managed and coordinated by the students themselves. Although speaking tasks are frequently used in EFL teaching (e.g., Lee & Hellermann, 2020) and assessment (e.g., Galaczi, 2014; Hirçin Çoban & Sert, 2020), many questions remain unanswered regarding the practices that students actually employ. Our analysis is based on video recordings collected in Czechia (approx. 7 hours) and Finland (approx. 4 hours). To better understand the nature of speaking tasks and to explore possible interactional differences between the talk produced by Czech and Finnish students of English, we used multimodal conversation analysis and scrutinized the moment-by-moment unfolding of sequences in which the students were carrying out speaking tasks. In this paper, we focus on collaboratively produced answers. We explore the participants’ use of embodied actions and task materials during task interaction. Our initial observations suggest that the embodied participation framework plays an important role – when the students were seated and oriented so that they could see and monitor each other, they were able to complete their peer’s utterances collaboratively. It follows that seating arrangement and some task components (e.g., note-taking) shape the way the students carry out speaking tasks. |