The effects of instructional focus and task type on pre-vocational learners’ ability in EFL oral interaction

Little is known about the e ect 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 situ- ated in the same training context, but that di ered in instructional focus and type of task. ese were compared to the e ects of business-as-usual instruction. Multilevel analysis revealed that all experimental groups out- performed the ‘business-as-usual’ control group on oral interaction skills (N = 199), with similar results for the programmes. Positive e ects 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 contex- tualised oral interaction instruction is bene cial to the development of pre- vocational learners’ interaction skills.