English Language Teaching in its Social Context

100 LEO VAN LIERSpeaker 2, an ESL learner, is the same person in both interactions, but in the first herinterlocutor is of roughly equal proficiency and in the second her interlocutor is a nativelikebilingual speaker. The first extract illustrates symmetry, and all utterances exhibit a highdegree of contingency. The second extract is more like an interview in which speaker 1encourages speaker 2 to speak. Relations of contingency are weaker, and symmetry isreduced. If contingency could be visualized as bundles of strings connecting utterances,then the strings would be thicker and more numerous in the first conversation and moresparse and spindly in the second.Many sorts of devices can be used to create contingency: empathy markers (“Wow!”),repetitions of parts of each other’s utterances (“two bedroom ~ two bedroom”), intonationpatterns, gestures, and so on. The devices come from a stock of resources similar toGumperz’s (1992) “contextualization cues” (indeed, as I suggested above, the creation ofcontingencies overlaps significantly with the process of contextualization), though anyinteractional marker that can be used to make a contingent link can also be used for otherpurposes, and this makes tabulating and quantifying contingency impossible.Contingency, negotiation, and language learningThe dynamics of interaction have been studied in most detail by Teresa Pica and hercolleagues (Pica 1987,1992; Pica and Doughty 1985; Pica,Young, and Doughty 1987).Thisresearch, which focuses on opportunities for learners to carry out repair strategies followingcommunicative problems, has revealed various conditions that favor or disfavor suchinteractional modification and has shown how it benefits comprehension. According to Pica(1 987), “What enables learners to move beyond their current interlanguage receptive andexpressive capacities when they need to understand unfamiliar linguistic input or whenrequired to produce a comprchcnsiblc message are opportunities to modify and restructuretheir interaction with their interlocutor until mutual comprehension is reached”.By resolving communicative problems through the use of interactional modifications(requests for clarification or confirmation, comprehension checks, recasts, and other suchrepairing moves), the learner obtains comprehensible input or makes new input availablefor learning. Research has shown how learners actively work on the language to increasetheir knowledge and proficiency.The following observations, based on these analyses of repair in inter-language talk,might help to place repairing in the overall context of interactional language use.First, as Guy Aston has pointed out, repair work and adjustments of various kinds canbe used to express convergence of perspectives among participants or to “seek closure ona problem” (Rudduck 1991), not necessarily to make something comprehensible. GeorgeYule (1 990) found that more-proficient interlocutors sometimes simply decide to give upon certain problematic items in a task and move on.Therefore repair may have results otherthan increased comprehension, though incrcascd comprehension can reasonably be regardedas its chief aim.Second, the preponderance of repair (in the highly visible form of interactionalmodifications) may be the result of the type of discourse investigated. In much of the workof Pica and associatcs (Pica,Young, and Doughty 1987; Pica 1992), the activity types inquestion are communication tasks in which participants (often a native speaker and anonnative speaker) need to exchange information. This need leads to interaction thatis usually both asymmetrical and unequal, an environment in which explicit repair,with imbalances of the kind illustrated by Yule, tends to be salient. A similar focus on