Page 124 - Beyond Methods

112 Facilitating negotiated interaction
mer is concerned with the relationship between modified input and modified interaction. Thus, the former is oriented to a study of the use of language structures and conversational adjustments neces- sary to create a coherent piece of written or spoken text suitable to a particular communicative event.
There are at least three strands of knowledge we have gained from the studies on the relationship between input, interaction, and output:
• comprehensible input is necessary but not sufficient to promote L2 development;
• negotiated interaction consisting of comprehension checks, con- firmation checks, and clarification requests plays a facilitative, not a causative, role in the development of linguistic competence among L2 learners; and
• comprehensible output has the potential to provide learners with opportunities to notice the gap in their developing interlanguage, to test their hypotheses, to use corrective feedback, and to move from meaning-based processing to a grammar-based processing.
While this knowledge is indeed noteworthy, there are certain limitations to treating interaction as a textual/interpersonal activ- ity. That input modifications and interactional modifications are crucial for L2 development has been widely recognized. However, there has not been adequate recognition that providing input and interactional modifications means much more than providing op- portunities for comprehensible input or for conversational adjust- ments.
Treating an interactional engagement as no more than a con- versational adjustment cannot but yield a distorted picture of the role of interaction in L2 development. No doubt, conversational ad- justments do have a role to play in promoting communication or in resolving miscommunication. But, clearly, negotiated interaction is much broader than a mere linguistic construct. It entails a spec- trum of individual, social, cultural, and political factors that create the very context and character of language communication. There- fore, in order to facilitate an effective interplay of various factors involved in language communication and language development, we may have to go beyond the narrow confines of interaction as a textual/interpersonal activity, and consider the role of interaction as an ideational activity as well.