Effects on students' production during communicative tasks' performances

Nowadays, the most important teaching method for second language that is being implemented in the schools is the communicative approach in which students are encouraged to produce in the target language. Tasks are the tools designed for making the students use the English language in a communicative way and cooperatively produce a tangible outcome. The problem of this method that may concern many teachers is the shortage of information that we have about it and about how to create communicative tasks in order to make this approach effective. This study aimed to discover which aspects of the communicative tasks affect the students’ production and what impacts, if any, the kinds of pairing have during the students’ interactions. Three tasks were designed with different outcomes (open or closed), procedures to complete them (written or oral) and three kinds of pairs performed them (H-H, H-L and L-L). The results showed great variability in the students’ production across these three independent variables of the tasks. For the kind of outcome and the type of pairing, there are evidences that they have a great impact as very different results are found when these variables are changed. With respect to the procedure to complete the tasks (oral or written), the different effects on students’ production we want to promote will need to be taken into account because each procedure encourage different production effects