Introduction

Once their dyadic task interactions are underway, student interaction is, to no surprise, most often oriented directly to the task assigned by the teacher. As the previous chapter showed, the talk-in-interaction students use to start these tasks is not directly taught and (in most cases) not part of the teachers' instructions for carrying out tasks. Similarly, while the task is underway, students face micro-contexts when a particular social action may be relevant but for which (as in the case of opening the interaction) the teacher-assigned task has not provided language. The social action of focus here are non-elicited story tellings. As with opening interactions, the fact that story tellings are not taught by the teacher should not be seen as a fault of task design; well-designed classroom tasks provide space for students' creativity with the language. What is apparent is that in doing task-focused dyadic interaction, even in classes for students at a beginning proficiency level, students use the linguistic and interactive resources available to them to engage in the basic mechanisms of turn taking regardless of what the teacher-assigned task is. Such mechanisms include the preference for one speaker to speak at a time, repairing areas of trouble in their talk (Hellermann, forthcoming) and, as this chapter illustrates, undertaking story tellings. The forthcoming analyses will show that the mechanisms that adult learners of English use for their story tellings and their purposes for their undertaking are similar to those methods used by expert speakers of the language reported in the literature on conversational story tellings in US American English (Jefferson, 1978; Ochs, 1997; Sacks, 1974, 1992). These unsolicited story tellings from student-student dyadic task interaction show more evidence for the uninstructed micro-interactive practices that (re)constitute the adult language learning classroom community of practice.