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Lorena Valmori graduated in the Second Language Studies doctoral program at Michigan State University. Her teaching experience has informed her research interests in motivational dynamics, identity, and emotions in second language learning. She is currently teaching EFL in high school and collaborating with Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy). She recently published in Language Teaching.

A large body of research has shown that second language (L2) interaction promotes L2 development (Mackey, 2012), with many empirical studies investigating the most favorable conditions for interaction-driven learning to take place. Language learning is inherently a hypothesis-testing process where learners make predictions about language and use input data to test whether they are correct or not. These hypotheses are put to the test when breakdowns occur in L2 interactions. During breakdowns input and output can be negotiated by means of comprehension checks “Do you understand what I mean?”, clarification requests “What did you mean?”, and confirmation checks “Do you mean this?” which enhance linguistic information, making it more salient or noticeable, and pushing learners to modify their original output to be more targetlike.

In instructed contexts, learners engaged in L2 interactions can benefit from corrective feedback, which aims at drawing learners’ attention to their incorrect utterences, forcing them to test their hypotheses about their new language. Corrective feedback varies in the degree of explicitness, from implicit feedback such as providing the correct reformulation of learners’ incorrect utterance (recast) to the more explicit indication that a “rule” has been broken (metalinguistic feedback). Research has been inconclusive regarding the most effective kind of feedback, as the different types of feedback have shown their effectiveness in different contexts according to learners’ developmental level and individual differences. What makes feedback effective is the number and saliency of the targeted structures corrected, with lexical and pronunciation recasts being more noticed than recasts on morphological and syntactic errors (Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000).

Findings in interaction research have indicated the most favorable (1) task characteristics (cognitive demands and interactional factors), (2) interlocutor variables (nativeness, familiarity, gender, proficiency), and (3) learners’ varibales (proficiency, aptitude, working memory, affective factors) for more negotiations and thus learning to take place during interactions.

• In particular, as far as tasks are concerned, higher task complexity such as larger amounts of information and reasoning involved, and having to request and provide different portions of information to reach the same convergent goal seem to promote the greatest opportunities for input, feedback and modified output.
• As far as intrlocutor variables are concerned, more negotiations are generated when learners take up the challenge and interact with more advanced interlocutors.
• Finally, learners’ internal variables affect the way they can take advantage of the learning opporunities afforded by the favorable contextual conditions (task and interlocutor). Higher proficiency and working memory have been shown to help students notice the feedback more.

One thing to consider though is that the very same factors that promote learning through interaction can also be anxiety-inducing, affecting what learners notice during interactions, their perception of their performance and their involvement in the interaction iteself. To reduce language anxiety in interaction, realistic beliefs and expectations about the language learning process should be promoted for learners to approach L2 interactions willing to accept the challenges and take the opportunities they afford.

References

Mackey, A. (2012). Input, interaction, and corrective feedback in L2 learning. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Mackey, A., Gass, S. M., & McDonough, K. (2000). How do learners perceive  interactional feedback?. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22(4), 471–497.