Within the context of second language acquisitio, the interaction hypothesis suggests that receiving comprehensible input and interactional feedback (Gass, 1997; Long, 1996; Pica, 1994b), being pushed to make changes in output (Swain, 1995, 2005), and negotiating for meaning (Gass, 2003) are all helpful for second language learning. Pedagogical tasks are important for creating a roadmap for these interactions. Robinson (2011) summarizes the gains of using these tasks:

• Tasks provide a context for negotiating and comprehending the meaning of language provided in task input, or used by a partner performing the same task.
• Tasks provide opportunities for uptake of (implicit or explicit) corrective feedback on a participant’s production, by a partner, or by a teacher.
• Tasks provide opportunities for incorporation of premodified input, containing “positive evidence” of forms likely to be important to communicative success and that may previously have been unknown or poorly controlled.
• Tasks provide opportunities for noticing the gap between a participant’s production and input provided and for metalinguistic reflection on the form of output.
• Task demands can focus attention on specific concepts required for expression in the second language (L2) and prompt effort to grammaticize them in ways that the L2 formally encodes them, with consequences for improvements in accuracy of production.
• Simple task demands can promote access to and automatization of the currently emerged interlanguage means for meeting these demands, with consequences for improved fluency of production.
• Task demands can also promote effort at reconceptualizing and rethinking about events, in ways that match the formal means for encoding conceptualization that L2s make available.
• Sequences of tasks can consolidate memories for previous efforts at successfully resolving problems arising in communication, on previous versions, thereby strengthening memory for them.
• Following attempts to perform simpler versions, complex tasks can prompt learners to attempt more ambitious, complex language to resolve the demands they make on communicative success, thereby stretching interlanguage and promoting syntacticization, with consequences for improved complexity of production.
• Additionally, all of the above happen within a situated communication context that can foster form-functio-meaning mapping and can do so in ways that motivate learners to learn.