The Positive Role of Writing in Speaking Tasks: The case of values clarification tasks

One of the problems of implementing tasks into EFL classrooms is the notion that tasks cannot help improve students' grammar production. There have been many suggestions to address this, including adding a post-task language analysis phase; using tasks that naturally elicit a form; generating incidental learning from interactive conditions; and arranging cognitive demands to push for accurate language during task performance. Although they are useful contributions, only the post-task language analysis can be applied to open-ended opinion-gap tasks. This is problematic because opinion-gap tasks are very common in course textbooks and teachers have been known to replace closed, focused tasks with opinion-gap tasks because students' prefer them. Therefore, this study investigated two opinion-gap tasks, the group discussion (GD) and the values clarification (VC) tasks to see if the changed structure of the VC task, one that involved speech-thenwriting, could prompt more incidental focus to grammar and provide a means for teachers to incorporate both language and grammar into more tasks that are more appealing to students.