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.
Little is known about the effects of different instructional approaches on learner affect in oral interaction in the foreign language classroom. In a randomized experiment with Dutch pre-vocational learners (N = 147), we evaluated the effects of 3 newly developed instructional programs for English as a foreign language (EFL). These programs differed in instructional focus (form-focused vs. interaction strategies- oriented) and type of task (pre-scripted language tasks vs. information gap tasks). Multilevel analyses revealed that learners’ enjoyment of EFL oral interaction was not affected by instruction, that willingness to communicate (WTC) decreased over time, and that self-confidence was positively affected by combining information gap tasks with interactional strategies instruction. In addition, regression analyses revealed that development in learners’ WTC and enjoyment did not have predictive value for achievement in EFL oral interaction, but that development in self-confidence did explain achievement in EFL oral interaction in trained interactional contexts.
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