English Language Teaching in its Social Context

82 PETER SKEHANIn the literature, two general accounts of the role of communication in language developmenthave been proposed: language development through the negotiation of meaning(Pica 1994, for example); and development through the operation of strategic competence(such as Bialystok 1990). We will examine each of them in turn to assess whether they canclarify whether output and interaction have a positive influence, and if so, what that influencemight be.Negotiation of meaningAdvocates of the negotiation of meaning approach (Gass andVaronis 1994 and Pica 1994,for example) suggest that the ongoing identification of difficulties in interactive encountersstimulates learners to overcome such difficulties. In so doing, it is hypothesized thatmodifications which are made to speech in the service of repairing conversational breakdownhave beneficial spin-off effects on underlying interlanguage. Conversation is then seen as theideal supportive mechanism to:12identify areas where interlanguage is limited and needs cxtension;provide scaffolding and feedback at precisely the point when it will be most usefulsince the learner will be particularly sensitive to the cues provided to enable newmeanings to be encoded.Conversational moves such as comprehension checks, clarification requests, and thelike will reflect how conversation leads to engagement with an underlying interlanguagesystem whcn it is made unusually malleablc.To link back with the roles for output discussedabove, such negotiation of meaning provides itleal opportunities for hypotheses to be testedand a syntactic mode of processing to be highlighted.There are, however, problems here. Aston (1 986), for example, has questioned thedesirability of contriving interactions intended to generate extensivc negotiation of meaning,and whose value is judged according to how well this is achieved. He proposes, in fact, thatsuch interactions can he irritating for students, and unrepresentative as far as naturaldiscourse is concerned. The wider issue, essentially, is that it is one thing for successfulnegotiation to take place, but quite another for this to have beneficial consequenccs forinterlanguage development. Far from scaffolding interlanguage development, negotiationsequences may distract the learners and overload the processing systems they arc using, withthe result that even when successful scaffolded negotiations occur which produce morecomplex language, these may not have an impact upon underlying change because there isno time to consolidate them.In any case, there is also the possibility that such studies may have over-estimated theempirical importance of negotiation for meaning. Foster (1998) demonstrates that althoughone can, indeed, point to differences between interaction types and participation patterns asfar as negotiation of meaning indices are concerned, global figures disguise the true state ofaffairs. In fact, unusually active students, whatever the task or participation pattern, engagein the same amount of negotiation of meaning ~ nil. As a result, we have to conclude that formost students this aspcct of output does not have a definite impact on interlanguage changeand development.Strategic competenceThe situation is not particularly different with respect to the operation of strategiccompetence and communication strategies, the other more general framework which mightI