This paper presents the project “From monologues to dialogues”, a collaboration between teachers and researchers. The project addresses the parallel interaction which often characterises pupil-pupil conversation in the language classroom by exploring task design and “good” interaction. The presentation also offers insights from the collaborative process.
The starting point for the project "From monologues to dialogues" was language teachers' difficulties in organising activities for oral interaction. The project, which is now in its fifth year, includes several small-scale subject didactic studies that are planned and carried out collaboratively by teachers and researchers. It is funded by local school authorities. This paper presents preliminary findings and discusses how research interests and practicalities can be negotiated in joint projects.
Typical pupil classroom conversation can be likened with so called parallel interaction (Galaczi, 2008), characterised by a series of question-response sequences that resemble prompted monologues. The present study is grounded on the assumption that the way oral tasks are designed and set-up might be problematic and that it should be possible to design meaningful tasks which promote oral interaction in the language classroom. Over the years, tasks have been designed (Ellis, 2003), tried out in the classroom and revised through an iterative process of three cycles. So far, findings show that task design affects pupil interaction. For example, results indicate that "less is more", in that comprehensive instructions and the use of many instructional materials may hinder the pupils' interaction. While the project has concluded that the tasks designed more recently promote interaction, we are now exploring what "good" task-oriented interaction means through the analytical affordances of conversation analysis (Sidnell, 2010). Preliminary findings indicate that in the revised tasks, pupils engage in collaborative and co-constructed interaction by attending to each other's turns-at-talk and formulating fitting turns that foster the progressivity of the activity.
The project contributes to literature on task-based instruction and to subject didactics. It also offers insights into teacher-researcher collaboration aiming to produce both local and public knowledge.
