Managing task uptake in oral proficiency interviews

Abstract

Tasks are a key organizing principle in second language learning, education, and performance assessment. Their appeal comes from the need to learn, teach, and test language for use in social domains and activities that have real-life relevance for second language speakers, and the fundamental insight that the activity is the most powerful (although not necessarily the only) structuring force of language use and attendant social and cognitive processes. Other than this basic consensus, conceptualizations of tasks and the practices of conducting task-structured activities vary widely among a range of epistemological and theoretical traditions and are shaped by domain-specific concerns and objectives (e.g., Branden, 2006; Branden, Bygate, & Norris, 2009; Bygate, Skehan, & Swain, 2001; Ellis, 2003; Robinson, 2011). In approaches to instructed second language acquisition that consider interaction as fundamental to language learning, the interactional and cognitive environments generated through task-based interaction offer important opportunities for L2 learning. In oral language assessment, tasks are designed to generate speech samples that enable inferences to the test taker’s oral language proficiency. Despite the diversity of research and educational practices in task-based language learning, teaching, and assessment that has evolved over the past thirty years, the task principle continues to provide a lasting unifying focus.