Page 115 - Beyond Methods

Facilitating negotiated interaction 103 with the textual and interpersonal dimensions than with the ide-
ational dimension. Let us consider each of these in detail.
Interaction as a Textual Activity
Most early interactional studies treat interaction as a textual activity in which learners and their interlocutors modify their input phono- logically, lexically, and syntactically in order to maximize chances of mutual understanding. Such a preoccupation with textual aspects of input and interaction can best be understood in a historical per- spective. A major impetus for L2 interactional studies came from research on caretaker-talk conducted in the context of child first language acquisition.
Empirical studies carried out during the 1970s (e.g., Snow and Ferguson, 1977) showed that the caretaker’s speech addressed to the child contained utterances with a number of formal (i.e., lin- guistic) adjustments in comparison to speech used in adult-adult conversations. The formal adjustments include: short utterances; limited range of syntactic-semantic relations; few subordinate and coordinate constructions; modified pitch, intonation and rhythm; and frequent repetitions.
Extending the concept of caretaker-talk to L2 speakers, re- searchers studied modified speech used by native speakers of a lan- guage to outsiders with limited language proficiency. This modified speech has been referred to as foreigner-talk. Foreigner-talk has been found to be very similar to caretaker-talk (Ferguson, 1975). Specifically, it is characterized by a slow rate of delivery, clear artic- ulation, pauses, emphatic stress, exaggerated pronunciation, para- phrasing, and substitutions of lexical items by synonyms, and by omission, addition, and replacement of syntactic features.
Moving from foreigner-talk to teacher-talk was an easy and log- ical step. Teacher-talk, that is, the simplified language teachers use in order to talk to L2 learners, was also found to contain character- istics of foreigner-talk. Teacher-talk, as can be expected, puts more emphasis on simplified input rather than on any extended verbal interaction between teachers and learners. Such a limited talk was considered sufficient for classroom L2 development, at least at the initial stages. A well-known hypothesis that emphasized the impor- tance of simplified teacher-talk, and thus the textual dimension of interaction, is Krashen’s input hypothesis.