Learner Output And Hypothesis Testing

This study is designed to explore the learner'hypothesis testing attempts in their oral production when engaged in a communicative task, to find out to what extent learners'hypothesis testing attempts result in well-formed or ill-formed output, and also by comparing different hypothesis testing patterns between teacher-learner interaction and learner-learner interaction, to determine which of the two contexts is better for the learner's ongoing hypotheses to become confirmed language knowledge.In the last two decades, a great many researchers have turned their attention to the role of comprehensible output in SLA. Except for the fluency function commonly assigned to learner output, Swain proposes three more functions of learner output: noticing function, metalinguistic function and hypothesis testing function. Since most studies have examined the first two functions, hypothesis testing function becomes our main concern in this study. Equal attention is paid to the interactional feedback provided by interlocutors to those ill-formed hypotheses and a favorable pairing type for second language development to occur.12 first-year English majors from a certain college in China, together with four Chinese English teachers, participate in this study. These participants are divided into two dyad types: teacher-learner dyads (N=4) and learner-learner dyads (N=4).The above-mentioned 8 dyads are assigned to complete a picture-description task, with a learner describing the picture while the teacher/learner interlocutor reproducing the picture according to the description. Their interactions during the task are recorded and transcribed as the data for study. With an aim to demonstrate hypothesis testing function of comprehensible output, the valid utterances by 7 dyads are analyzed into hypothesis testing episodes (HTEs). The research method employed in the study is a quantitative and qualitative description of HTEs and interactional feedback.The results show that learners tested out one hypothesis about the target language (TL) every 2.8 min. The results also reveal that among all 64 HTEs found in the interactions, 35 of them result in well-formed output while 29 lead to ill-formed output. Most ill-formed outputs (26 out of 29) originate from ill-formed hypotheses going unchallenged by interlocutors. Finally the comparison between teacher-learner interaction and learner-learner interaction finds significantly higher frequency of HTEs and more interactional feedback from the interlocutors in the former context than in the latter.These results were interpreted to mean that learners do test their hypothesis about target language during oral production, and that failing to provide corrective feedback or negative evidence to learners'ill-formed hypotheses constitutes a signal for the confirmation of the utterances or rules from the perspective of the internal processing system of the learner, which, in turn constitutes a step toward internalizing linguistic knowledge. Finally, the comparison between teacher-learner interaction with learner-learner interaction shows a clear preference of the former, which can be explained to mean that in a naturally-occurring communicative tasks, working with a teacher, or a learner of higher proficiency level, is more favorable than working with a peer learner.