Little is known about the effect of diverging pedagogies on the development of interactional oral skills in a foreign language. In a controlled study, we evaluated three newly developed instructional programmes that were situated in the same training context, but that differed in instructional focus and type of task. These were compared to the effects of business-as-usual instruction. Multilevel analysis revealed that all experimental groups outperformed the ‘business-as-usual’ control group on oral interaction skills (N = 199), with similar results for the programmes. Positive effects were found on interaction skills for trained contexts of use only. No transfer was found to tasks in other contexts of use. We conclude that receiving contextualised oral interaction instruction is beneficial to the development of pre-vocational learners’ interaction skills.