Introduction

Pica (1997) pointed out that ‘task’ was a construct of equal interest to researchers and teachers and afforded a basis for a ‘relationship of compatibility’ between them:

Pica’s claim of a relationship of compatibility, however, is challengeable on two fronts. First, researchers have frequently resorted to using tasks in laboratory contexts rather than in actual classrooms, raising the question as to whether laboratory-based studies of tasks have much relevance to classrooms. Second, and perhaps more important, the kinds of questions that researchers and teachers ask about tasks are often not the same.

A number of studies have investigated the effects of setting on task performance (Eckerth, 2008b; Foster, 1998; Gass et al., 2005; Slimani-Rolls, 2005). Only Gass et al. reported a direct comparison of task performance in laboratory and classroom settings. They asked students enrolled in a third semester university Spanish course to perform three tasks (two information-gap tasks and one opinion-gap task) in dyads in a laboratory setting with the researcher present and in their normal classroom setting. They reported no statistically significant differences in three aspects of interaction (negotiation of meaning, language-related episodes, and recasts) in the two settings. They argued that the results of their study demonstrated that laboratory-based research findings could be cautiously generalized to classroom settings. However, Eckerth (2008b) cast doubt on whether Gass et al.’s classroom really functioned as a classroom. He noted that the students were asked to complete the three tasks in an uninterrupted succession and that the three tasks were all completed in nearly the same time. He concluded ‘while the classroom may have looked like a classroom, it may not have been perceived as such by the students’.