Using collaborative language production tasks to promote students’ language awareness1

Abstract

This paper presents data of 13 and 14 year old intermediate and advanced learners of French working collaboratively to complete a text reconstruction task. The task was designed to focus the students’ attention and discussion on the form of the message they were constructing. It was hypothesised that this kind of opportunity to produce language would promote their language learning by (1) making them aware of gaps in their existing knowledge which they would subsequently seek to fill; (2) raising their awareness of the links between the form, function and meaning of words as they worked to construct their intended message; and (3) obtaining feedback that they would receive from their peers and their teacher as they completed the task. The results support the hypothesis and also provide rich insights for teachers, researchers and curriculum planners into the language learning process in a collaborative setting; the students’ understandings of how language ‘works'; and the effects of certain grouping patterns on the ensuing student talk.