To explore how fifth grade students used their oral language in small group discussions to remake information, a study set up a series of small group tasks in the curriculum areas of social studies, current events, science, poetry, and mathematics for one class of 28 Canadian students. Students were randomly divided into seven groups of four students each. The tasks were described on sheets that were distributed to each student. In addition, each task was explained to the small groups by the researcher who remained available for assistance. Each group's discussion was tape recorded and transcribed for further analysis. Findings revealed that each curriculum task placed different demands on the students' use of language: (1) in social studies the task of defining generally limited the expansion of thoughts; (2) the discussions in current events created the widest use of personal language strategies; (3) in science, the presence of concrete materials reduced the need for elaborated language use; (4) the poetry tasks produced restricted strategies for learning; and (5) the mathematics problems produced the language to learn, unique to the subject. (HOD)