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This paper reports on a piece of classroom research involving a group of Liberal Arts/TEFL undergraduates from the Federal University of Amazonas. Informed by Jane Willis’s framework for task-based language learning and Michael Breen’s insights into the involvement of learners in the evaluation of learning task cycles, a unit of study was designed and implemented to experiment with clustered tasks as a means of maintaining peer-peer oral/aural interaction in the classroom at substantial levels. While the results indicate that Breen’s suggestion is effective in keeping learners engaged in meaningful interactions in the classroom for an extended period of time, it is still only intuitively established that Willis’s framework is an adequate way of dealing with the focus-on-form versus focus-on-use dilemma in the second/foreign language classroom. A key assumption underlying the experiment is that the longer learners use the target language to communicate in the classroom the more their interlanguage is enhanced. Furthermore, it is suggested that this analytical approach can be an alternative to the task-repetition approach proposed by Martin Bygate.

Keywords: analysis of learning tasks, clustered tasks, meaningful interaction, enhancement of interlanguage