A qualitative study of interaction as a component of conversation partner talk in a collegiate setting

The purpose of this study was to advance knowledge about the potential contribution of interaction in a second or foreign language to second language acquisition by studying the interactional patterns employed by a group of participants consisting of two ESL learners and four English native speakers in a conversation partners program. Each week during the Winter quarter of 1996, two of the English-speaking conversation partners met in one-on-one interactional sessions with the two Kuwaiti ESL learners. Data in the form of audio-taped recordings, researcher's observational notes, and member checks were collected and analyzed to identify the components of the second language that the participants encountered and used to participate in the interactions, the patterns the participants used to communicate and negotiate meaning in the L2, and the interrelationships between the patterns of linguistic precessing and social interaction employed by the participants in the study.; The components of the second language utilized by the participants to partake in the interactions included phonological and lexical information about the L2 as well as opportunities to practice the communication skills of listening to and speaking with English native speakers. The second section of the data analysis identified the patterns of language use found within the talk of conversation partners described in the first section. The analysis highlighted the fact that participants' acts of communication and negotiation of meaning were undertaken not only to achieve mutual intelligibility but also to maintain the social relationships between the ESL learners and the English speakers as members of the conversation partners program. The third section identified three ways in which linguistic and social processes were related in the talk of the six conversation partners. First, linguistically-motivated processing was primarily guided by the linguistic aspects of the L2 input that was produced by the participants in the course of their interactions. Second, socially-mediated processing was the product of participation in conversation partner talk as a communicative event produced by all participants. Third, conversation partner talk oscillated between linguistic and social processing in a reciprocal spiral relationship.