Input, Interaction, (and

Output)
Ling 5308
Sabrina Mossman
Readings:
 For this topic you have two readings. Because it is the
same topic, there is a great deal of overlap between the
two; however there are some differences.
 Mackey (1999) As graduate students, it is a good idea
for you to read original research instead of just textbook
chapters. Here we look at an empirical study examining
the effect of input & interaction on interlanguage
development—specifically question formation.
 Gass (Ch. 12) This reading is a textbook chapter. It
provides good definitions and real-language illustrations
of these concepts.
We are going to start with Mackey.
Input, Interaction, and Second
Language Development
(Mackey, 1999)
Ling 5308
Sabrina Mossman
Read pp. 557-562
 This section reviews much of the literature that is the
source for a lot of what we have already covered
regarding the role of input and interaction in language
acquisition. Take note of the names of the researchers—
these are important names in the field of SLA research
and language instruction.
 You also see some concepts here that we haven’t really
talked about such as Premodified input.
Read pp. 562-565

 This section is an extension of the

previous section, but with a focus on
the empirical studies that had been
carried out to examine the effect of
Interaction on Second Language
Acquisition at the time of this study.
The Method Section
pp. 565-571
 This section provides important information about how acquisition was
operationalized.
 This is important! Imagine, you are trying to look into someone’s head to
see what system they have in place for question formation. You can’t look
at it directly, so what do you have to do? You have to have them do
something to show you what the system in their head produces.
 So you can just make them make questions, right? Whatever structure the
questions have should reflect the system that produces them. Easy
enough.
 BUT…what if you aren’t just trying to see what the system in their head is,
but rather the changes in the system that occur as they are learning? How
can you capture that development? Think about why that may be difficult.

 Continued on the next slide…

The Method Section
565-571
 AND…not only are you trying to track development as it
happens, but how can you connect that development to
interaction?
 Okay, now read pp. 565-566, the section on Challenges
in Investigating a Link between Interaction and
Development—Operationalizations for answers to how
they did this.
The Method Section
565-571
 Another choice the researchers had to make was to
select a learning target. In other words, if they were
going to look at the relationship between interaction
and interlanguage development (or Second Language
Acquisition), what aspect of language development
were they going to look at? You can’t just look at
everything because there is not enough control. You
have to pick something.
 In this study they picked Question formation—an
EXCELLENT choice! Why? Read the section titled Second
Language Development, pp. 566-567, for the answer to
this question.
The Method Section
565-571
 They also had to choose tasks that would require that
the participants interact and produce questions. What
did they come up with? Read Materials pp. 567-568 to
find out.

 And, they also had to design the study, meaning they

had to get participants and put them in groups which
would receive the different treatments. Read
Participants, Design, and Procedure, pp. 568-570 to find
out how the study was carried out.
The Method Section
565-571
 Once they collected all the data from this tasks, they
had to code it somehow to be able to evaluate it.
Although there is a coding section here, it doesn’t really
give a lot of information about how they coded. It does
provide some key information though, so go ahead and
read the Coding section on p. 571
 The Results! 571-575
What did they find? This section presents the results. Don’t worry about
understanding the statistics at this point if you are not familiar with statistical
analyses. You can still read the results, and just focus on the prose rather than the
stats. (Note that if you decide to pursue research yourself, you will have to read
and understand the stats too.) So for example, look at the sentence:
“Despite the trends apparent in Figure 3, there was no evidence of significant
change across the four testing periods, F(3, 15) = 1.8, MSE = 5.94, p = .19” (p.
574).

From this sentence, you can tell that the groups they are describing (you know
which groups from the heading of the section) didn’t exhibit a change; in other
words, they didn’t pass from one stage of question formation to the next. You can
also tell from this sentence that there is a graph (Figure 3), and if you look at it it
might seem like there really was a change, but the statistics indicate that there was
no real change.

The point is, you don’t need to know what “F(3, 15) = 1.8, MSE = 5.94, p = .19”
means to understand that. So go ahead and read the results!
 Discussion
575-584

And in case you still didn’t really understand the results,

this section tells you what it all means. There is also an
examination of some specific interactions to give you an
idea of what happened and why in the different types of
groups.
Inevitably, the discussion is more fun to read than the
results.
 Finished with Mackey!
 At this point you should have a really strong
understanding of the nature of interaction and its
effect on language acquisition.
 Take a break! I recommend you put this all aside and
read the next reading tomorrow or the next day. But
don’t leave too much space between them because
you want to have this one somewhat fresh in your
mind when you read the next one.

 The next reading is a textbook chapter that describes

the nature of input, output, interaction, and most
importantly, feedback.
Input, Interaction, and
Output (Gass Ch. 12)
Ling 5308
Sabrina Mossman
 This reading is a little different. You already know about input,
interaction, and output, so you don’t have to read the whole
chapter. We are just going to zero in on certain parts to add some
new concepts to what you have already learned.
 You have read that interaction is important because it is through
interaction that learners are able to improve through negotiation
of meaning. This chapter illustrates how this works. It has many
examples so you can see interaction in action.
 As you read through the parts indicated on the next two slides,
make sure you understand the meanings of the concepts in bold.
These are the important key terms from this chapter.
 However, you also should pay extra attention to the section on
Feedback. This is going to be the focus of our research project,
so you want to make sure you have a clear understand of what
feedback is and the different types of feedback that can take
place.
 P. 340 Read the paragraph about “intake”.
 P. 342 Read the examples of “modified speech” to see examples of how
people use interaction to clarify.
 P. 344 to understand the concept of “backchannel cues”.
 P. 347-348 Read example (12-7) to see how comprehension is
accomplished through “clarification requests”.
 P. 348-349 Read the section on Interaction to understand the concept of
“negotiation of meaning,” “confirmation checks,” and
“comprehension checks.” Make sure to include the examples—this is the
best way to understand.
 P. 356-357 to understand and review the concept of comprehensible
output.
 Feedback
 Feedback is one of the most important concepts in this reading.
 P. 358-361Read from the paragraph on p. 358 beginning with “In another
study, McDonough…” and stop at “Hypothesis testing” on page 370. You
should know the difference between opportunity to modify,
enhanced opportunity to modify, and no feedback.
 P. 364 Read the section on recasts. Important concepts are, recasts
with opportunity to respond, recasts with no opportunity to
respond, repetition, primed production, metalinguistic cues, and
elicitation..
 For the rest of the chapters, just read through all the examples of
interaction. For each one, see if you can identify where the negotiation
of meaning takes place.
 You should be able to explain and
recognize:
 Intake  Enhanced opportunity to modify
 Modified speech  Feedback
 Backchannel cues  Recasts
 Clarification requests  Recasts with opportunity to respond
 Negotiation of meaning  Recasts with no opportunity to
respond
 Confirmation checks
 Repetition
 Comprehension checks
 Primed production
 Comprehensible output
 Meta-linguistic cues
 Opportunity to modify
 Elicitation
An additional note:
 339-340: The shift in attitude toward the input described here is important,
but I think it is important to tease some things apart here.
 Yes, the behaviorist view was that language was formed based on imitation, so the
input had to be there so children could imitate it. The UG view, the idea that we are
already born with a system in place and we only need ‘some’ input in order to
establish the rules of the language to acquire it, replaced the behaviorist view, and
this was revolutionary.
BUT
 We have to remember what this means for L1 vs L2. The idea for L1 is that we
don’t have to have complete examples of the language in order to draw
conclusions about the language because so much is already defined by UG, and it
is very possible that this is also true for L2. The issue for L2 is that usually the input
received by L2 learners is far far far less than it is for L1 learners, and in very
different contexts.
SO
 When we talk about the input hypothesis and we say that a tremendous amount of
input is necessary for L2 learners to acquire a language, this is NOT in opposition to
the innatist view. In fact, Krashen was very much an innatist. So when they author
says “…only a few instances of exposure are sufficient to trigger the appropriate
language forms” (p. 340) the “few instances” is still within a great deal of input,
particularly for L2 learners.