Communicative stress includes factors such as learners' familiarity with a topic, the number of interlocutors involved in the interaction, the degree of communicative competence or topic familiarity exhibited by learners' interlocutors, the extent to which a conversation is clearly organized and the degree to which the talk focuses on the "why" rather than the "how" of task completion. The factors covered by the variable of communicative stress suggest that sequencing decisions can be made by progressively "upping the communicative ante" of tasks (Candlin 1987).