Staying on Task in Oral Proficiency Interviews
Gabriele Kasper
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
3:30 pm
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Room TBA
Abstract
Research on tasks in instructed L2 learning has pointed out differences between task-as-workplan and task-in-process (Breen, 1989; Seedhouse, 2004, inter alia). Tasks-in-process are jointly constructed between the student participants who collaboratively interpret and negotiate the task. On occasion, the activity and the speech exchange system emerging in student collaboration come out very differently from the teacher’s pedagogical intent as embodied in the workplan (e.g., Markee, 2005; Mori, 2002).
In tests of spoken L2 ability conducted in an interview format, such as the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), interviewers also set tasks for candidates, such as introducing themselves, providing narratives of daily routines, past events, and future plans, reporting and commenting on current affairs, and describing spaces, objects, or persons. But unlike the peer interaction in language learning tasks, interviewers participate directly in the OPI tasks. Not only do they deliver task instructions, they also act as co-participants while the task is in progress.
This interactional arrangement enables the interviewer to monitor candidates’ uptake of the task instructions on a moment-by-moment basis and redirect candidates’ actions if they appear “off-task”. In a corpus of over 100 OPIs, we see with some regularity that interviewers treat candidates’ displayed understandings of the task instruction as problematic and engage in some corrective action. The study examines from a conversation-analytic perspective how misalignments of interviewer task instructions and candidates’ handling of the task are interactionally constructed and how “off-task” conduct is addressed (or redressed) in subsequent talk.
Breen, M. (1989). The evaluation cycle for language learning tasks. In R. K. Johnson (Ed.), The second language curriculum (pp. 187-206). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Markee, N. (2005).The organization of off-task talk in second language classrooms. In K. Richards & P. Seedhouse (Eds.), Applying conversation analysis (pp. 197-213). Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mori, J. (2002). Task-design, plan and development of talk-in-interaction: An analysis of a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Applied Linguistics, 23, 323-347.
Seedhouse, P. (2004). The interactional architecture of the language classroom: A conversation analysis perspective. Oxford: Blackwell
This lecture is free and open to the public. Funding is from the College of Letters and Science Anonymous Fund and a gift from the Schoenleber F
|
