Designing Simple Interactive Tasks for Small Groups
Roger Nunn

The selection and design of tasks to practise interactive ability which simulate real-life language use is important to any course that includes the aim of improving ability in spoken interaction. Just as providing interactive tasks can never be sufficient in itself to develop conversational ability, merely following a textbook is unlikely to stimulate small-group interaction. Specific tasks of the kind rarely found in textbooks need to be designed for this purpose. While there exists a considerable and valuable literature on group-work in the fields of co-operative learning, classroom interaction and task-based learning, this short paper has only a practical focus, providing a checklist for task designers based on experience and specific examples in the form of a set of easily replicable and adaptable worksheets.
A Checklist for Task Designers
The following criteria are worth considering when designing tasks.
1. Simulating "Real" Conversation
Classroom tasks are simulations and can only approximate real-life communication, but real-life skills, such as adjusting to an interlocutor`s contribution can be built in. Tasks designed to practise interactive ability should be an appropriate task for the students. They must be able to imagine themselves in the situation. When there is a reason for selecting an unrealistic task, the lack of realism could be emphasized. Using imagination beyond the students`experience is then deliberately forefronted.
2. Exchanging
An interactive task should require students to exchange information, opinions, attitudes, but not for its own sake. There should be a real purpose; each participant should need to find something out from the others in order to complete the task.
3. Checking Understanding
The task should require the participants to make sure they fully understand what the others tell them and to make themselves fully understood to the others. In this way, students will need to adjust to each other`s contributions.
4. Improvising
The task should require both predictable and unpredictable communication. Real conversation always involves unpredictability so an ability to improvise needs to be practised. For example, an attempt to come to an agreement is unpredictable. There is no requirement to actually reach an agreement, so the participants may develop the conversation freely. On the other hand, they must exchange the information for an agreement to be possible and cannot easily avoid asking questions.
5. Equal Opportunity
Where possible, the task should allow participants (and definitely exam candidates) an equal opportunity to structure the conversation. Ideally, they should have equal access to important features of turn-taking such as self-selection and nomination and should be able to initiate, negotiate and follow up other participants` contributions. Care must therefore be taken not to devise assessment tasks that require or encourage the adoption of unequal roles in conversation (unless, of course, it is specifically designed to practise unequal social roles, such as boss-employee, etc).
6. Mixed-Ability
For mixed-ability courses, tasks should favour the production of contributions of all kinds. They should allow both weak and strong participants to extend themselves to their full ability. For strong participants, making themselves understood to students with less linguistic ability is a useful skill in itself. Opportunity and time must be available for candidates to hold the floor and produce longer contributions where appropriate, but they should also have the opportunity to use short conversational phrases reacting to the contributions of other speakers. Less able students should still be able to accomplish at least the first part of the task at their own level.
7. Models
Models of performance can be provided by making recordings of tasks using competent speakers of the language (not necessarily native speakers). These can be used for listening activities that focus on skills such as turn-taking or pronunciation, and language that students themselves can use.
8. Time Constraints
Reasonable time constraints should be imposed. A group of three students would normally require about 15-20 minutes to do the sample task below, although up to one hour of class time may be needed overall, taking preparation and follow-up activities into account.
9. Outcomes
Interactive activities are still pedagogical tasks and, as such, should have outcomes or results. Tasks for classroom instruction should have the potential for either a performance or a "report-back" phase, during which students could write a report or (a) group spokesperson(s) could report back to the class. This provides the opportunity for recycling language used in the task and for remedial work on language problems that arise during the task. At this stage, the teacher may wish to engage in techniques for correcting language and might want to correct even the smallest errors in pronunciation, lexis or grammar. This counteracts the potentially negative effects of free communication, such as pigeonization, "local speak", such as "katakana English" in Japan, etc.
10. Language Practice
The tasks will normally have some predictable features of language. Vocabulary on the topic has probably been taught using a textbook/worksheet, probably in a reading and/or listening activity. Students can be given intensive practice in language functions such as giving advice, expressing opinions,