Page 121 - Beyond Methods

Facilitating negotiated interaction 109 Reflective task 5.2
Before you proceed further, read the above interactional data again. Identify examples of comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification requests. Do you think modified interactions of this kind can facilitate L2 ac- quisition better than the three examples of modified input given earlier (see the examples from Krashen and Terrell given above)? In what way?
Interactional modifications made possible through negotiation of meaning, like the one exemplified above, are considered to facil- itate L2 development in two important ways. First, unlike any input modification that may make some of the structural features and lexical items salient by providing a lot of examples, it is the inter- actional modification that makes syntactic-semantic relationships transparent to the learner. In other words, input modifications may provide potentially acceptable input, but they do not help learners learn the relationship between form and meaning in order to de- velop the necessary capacity to use language for interactive purposes. It is the learner’s interactional efforts that make form-meaning relationships in the L2 data accessible and able to be internalized. Studies by Long as well as by Pica and her colleagues (e.g., Pica, Young, and Doughty, 1987) demonstrate that learners who were ex- posed to linguistically unmodified input with opportunities to negotiate meaning understood it better than learners who were ex- posed to a linguistically simplified version of the input but offered no opportunity for such negotiation.
Second, the communicative and cognitive effort required to ne- gotiate meaning can bring any problematic linguistic features to the learner’s immediate attention—features that might otherwise go unnoticed by the learner. In fact, the negative feedback learners receive through interactional modifications might induce them to selectively pay attention to some of the problematic features. By helping learners notice the linguistic features that are problematic for them, interactional modifications can help them focus and try to produce them correctly. In that sense, negotiated interaction “connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways” (Long, 1996, p. 452).
As the above discussion shows, interactional studies have high-