Group Work, Interlanguage Talk, and Second Language Acquisition
Group Work, Interlanguage Talk, and Second Language Acquisition
MICHAEL H. LONG
University of Hawaii at Manoa
PATRICIA A. PORTER
San Francisco State University
The use of group work in classroom second language learning has long been supported by sound pedagogical arguments. Recently, however, a psycholinguistic rationale for group work has emerged from second language acquisition research on conversation between non-native speakers, or interlanguage talk. Provided careful attention is paid to the structure of tasks students work on together, the negotiation work possible in group activity makes it an attractive alternative to the teacher-led, “lockstep” mode and a viable classroom substitute for individual conversations with native
speakers.
For some years now, methodologists have recommended smallgroup work (including pair work) in the second language classroom. In doing so, they have used arguments which, for the most part, are pedagogical. While those arguments are compelling enough, group work has recently taken on increased psycholinguistic significance due to new research findings on two related topics:
1) the role of comprehensible input in second language acquisition (SLA)
and 2) the negotiation work possible in conversation between non-native speakers, or interlanguage talk.
Thus, in addition to strong pedagogical arguments, there now exists a psycholinguistic rationale for group work in second language learning.
PEDAGOGICAL ARGUMENTS FOR GROUP WORK
There are at least five pedagogical arguments for the use of group work in second language (SL) learning.
They concern the potential of group work for increasing the quantity of language practice opportunities, for improving the quality of student talk, for individualizing
instruction, for creating a positive affective climate in the 207 classroom, and for increasing student motivation. We begin with a
brief review of those arguments.
Argument 1. Group work increases language practice opportunities.
In all probability, one of the main reasons for low achievement by
many classroom SL learners is simply that they do not have enough
time to practice the new language. This is especially serious in large
EFL classes in which students need to develop aural-oral skills, but it
is also relevant to the ESL context.
From observational studies of classrooms (e.g., Hoetker and
Ahlbrand 1969 and Fanselow 1977), we know that the predominant
mode of instruction is what might be termed the lockstep, in which
one person (the teacher) sets the same instructional pace and content
for everyone, by lecturing, explaining a grammar point, leading drill
work, or asking questions of the whole class. The same studies show
that when lessons are organized in this manner, a typical teacher of
any subject talks for at least half, and often for as much as two
thirds, of any class period (Flanders 1970). In a 50-minute lesson,
that would leave 25 minutes for the students. However, since 5
minutes is usually spent on administrative matters (getting pupils in
and out of the room, calling the roll, collecting and distributing
homework assignments, and so on) and (say) 5 minutes on reading
and writing, the total time available to students is actually more like
15 minutes. In an EFL class of 30 students in a public secondary
school classroom, this averages out to 30 seconds per student per
lesson—or just one hour per student per year. An adult ESL student
taking an intensive course in the United States does not fare much
better. In a class of 15 students meeting three hours a day, each
student will have a total of only about one and a half hours of
individual practice during a six-week program. Contrary to what
some private language school advertisements would have us believe,
this is simply not enough.
Group work cannot solve this problem entirely, but it can
certainly help. To illustrate with the public school setting, suppose
that just half the time available for individual student talk is devoted
to work in groups of three instead of to lockstep practice, in which
one student talks while 29 listen (or not, as the case may be). This
will change the total individual practice time available to each
student from one hour to about five and a half hours. While still too
little, this is an increase of over 500 percent.
Argument 2. Group work improves the quality of student talk.
The lockstep limits not only the quantity of talk students can
engage in, but also its quality. This is because teacher-fronted
208 TESOL QUARTERLY
lessons favor a highly conventionalized variety of conversation, one
rarely found outside courtrooms, wedding ceremonies, and classrooms.
In such settings, one speaker asks a series of knowninformation,
or display, questions, such as Do you work in the
accused's office at 27 Sloan Street?, Do you take this woman to be
your lawful wedded wife?, and Do you come to class at nine
o’clock? —questions to which there is usually only one correct
answer, already known to both parties. The second speaker responds
(I do) and then, in the classroom, typically has the correctness of the
response confirmed (Yes, Right, or Good). OnIy rarely does genuine
communication take place. (For further depressing details, see, for
example, Hoetker and Ahlbrand 1969, Long 1975, Fanselow 1977,
Mehan 1979, and Long and Sato 1983.)
An unfortunate but hardly surprising side effect of this sort of
pseudo-communication is that students’ attention tends to wander.
Consequently, teachers maintain a brisk pace to their questions and
try to ensure prompt and brief answers in return. This is usually
quite feasible, since what the students say requires little thought (the
same question often being asked several times) and little language
(mostly single phrases or short “sentences”). Teachers quickly
“correct” any errors, and students appreciate just as quickly that
what they say is less important than how they say it.
Such work may be useful for developing grammatical accuracy
(although this has never been shown). It is unlikely, however, to
promote the kind of conversational skills students need outside the
classroom, where accuracy is often important but where communicative
ability is always at a premium.
Group work can help a great deal here. First, unlike the lockstep,
with its single, distant initiator of talk (the teacher) and its group
interlocutor (the students), face-to-face communication in a small
group is a natural setting for conversation. Second, two or three
students working together for five minutes at a stretch are not
limited to producing hurried, isolated “sentences.” Rather, they can
engage in cohesive and coherent sequences of utterances, thereby
developing discourse competence, not just (at best) a sentence
grammar. Third, as shown by Long, Adams, McLean, and Casta๑os
(1976), students can take on roles and adopt positions which in lockstep
work are usually the teacher’s exclusive preserve and can thus
practice a range of language functions associated with those roles
and positions. While solving a problem concerning the siting of a
new school in an imaginary town, for example, they can suggest,
infer, qualify, hypothesize, generalize, or disagree. In terms of
another dimension of conversational management, they can develop
such skills—also normally practiced only by the teacher—as
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 209
topic-nomination, turn-allocation, focusing, summarizing, and clarifying.
(Some of these last skills also turn out to have considerable
psycholinguistic importance. ) Finally, given appropriate materials
to work with and problems to solve, students can engage in the kind
of information exchange characteristic of communication outside
classrooms—with all the creative language use and spontaneity this
entails—where the focus is on meaning as well as form. In other
words, they can in all these ways develop at least some of the variety
of skills which make up communicative competence in a second
language.
Argument 3. Group work helps individualize instruction.
However efficient it may be for some purposes—for example, the
presentation of new information needed by all students in a class—
the lockstep rides roughshod over many individual differences
inevitably present in a group of students. This is especially true of
the vast majority of school children, who are typically placed in
classes solely on the basis of chronological and mental age. It can
also occur in quite small classes of adults, however. Volunteer adult
learners are usually grouped on the basis of their aggregate scores on
a proficiency test. Yet, as any experienced teacher will attest,
aggregate scores often conceal differences among students in specific
linguistic abilities. Some students, for example, will have much
better comprehension than production skills, and vice versa. Some
may speak haltingly but accurately, while others, though fluent,
make lots of errors.
In addition to this kind of variability in specific SL abilities, other
kinds of individual differences ignored by lockstep teaching include
students’ age, cognitive/developmental stage, sex, attitude, motivation,
aptitude, personality, interests, cognitive style, cultural background,
native language, prior language learning experience, and
target language needs. In an ideal world, these differences would all
be reflected, among other ways, in the pacing of instruction, in its
linguistic and cultural content, in the level of intellectual challenge it
poses, in the manner of its presentation (e.g., inductive or deductive),
and in the kinds of classroom roles students are assigned.
Group work obviously cannot handle all these differences, for
some of which we still lack easily administered, reliable measures.
Once again, however, it can help. Small groups of students can work
on different sets of materials suited to their needs. Moreover, they
can do so simultaneously, thereby avoiding the risk of boring other
students who do not have the same problem, perhaps because they
speak a different first language, or who do have the same problem
210 TESOL QUARTERLY
but need less time to solve it. Group work, then, is a first step toward
individualization of instruction, which everyone agrees is a good
idea but which few teachers or textbooks seem to do much about.
Argument 4. Group work promotes a positive affective climate.
Many students, especially the shy or linguistically insecure, experience
considerable stress when called upon in the public arena of the
lockstep classroom. This stress is increased by the knowledge that
they must respond accurately and above all quickly. Research (see,
for example, Rowe 1974 and White and Lightbown 1983) has shown
that if students pause longer than about one second before beginning
to respond or while making a response, or (worse) appear not to
know the answer, or make an error, teachers will tend to interrupt,
repeat, or rephrase the question, ask a different one, “correct,”
and/or switch to another student. Not all teachers do these things, of
course, but most teachers do so more than they realize or would
want to admit.
In contrast to the public atmosphere of lockstep instruction, a
small group of peers provides a relatively intimate setting and,
usually, a more supportive environment in which to try out embryonic
SL skills. After extensive research in British primary and
secondary school classrooms, Barnes (1973:19) wrote of the smallgroup
setting:
An intimate group allows us to be relatively inexplicit and incoherent, to
change direction in the middle of a sentence, to be uncertain and selfcontradictory.
What we say may not amount to much, but our confidence
in our friends allows us to take the first groping steps towards sorting out
our thoughts and feelings by putting them into words. I shall call this sort
of talk “exploratory.”
In his studies of children’s talk in small groups, Barnes found a high
incidence of pauses, hesitations, stumbling over new words, false
starts, changes of direction, and expressions of doubt (I think,
probably, and so on). This was the speech of children “talking to
learn” (Barnes 1973:20) —talking, in other words, in a way and for a
purpose quite different from those which commonly characterize
interaction in a full-class session. There, the “audience effect” of the
large class, the perception of the listening teacher as judge, and the
need to produce a short, polished product all serve to inhibit this
kind of language.
Barnes (1973:19) draws attention to another factor:
It is not only size and lack of intimacy that discourage exploratory talk: if
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 211
relationships have been formalized until they approach ritual, this, too,
will make it hard for anyone to think aloud. Some classrooms can
become like this, especially when the teacher controls very thoroughly
everything that is said.
In other words, freedom from the requirement for accuracy at all
costs and entry into the richer and more accommodating set of
relationships provided by small-group interaction promote a positive
affective climate. This in turn allows for the development of the
kind of personalized, creative talk for which most aural-oral classes
are trying to prepare learners.
Argument 5. Group work motivates learners.
Several advantages have already been claimed for group work. It
allows for a greater quantity and richer variety of language practice,
practice that is better adapted to individual needs and conducted in
a more positive affective climate. Students are individually involved
in lessons more often and at a more personal level. For all these
reasons and because of the variety group work inevitably introduces
into a lesson, it seems reasonable to believe that group work
motivates the classroom learner.
Empirical evidence supporting this belief has been provided by
several studies reported recently in Littlejohn (1983). It has been
found, for example, that small-group, independent study can lead to
increased motivation to study Spanish among beginning students
(Littlejohn 1982); learners responding to a questionnaire reported
that they felt less inhibited and freer to speak and make mistakes in
the small group than in the teacher-led class. Similarly, in a study of
children’s attitudes to the study of French in an urban British
comprehensive school (Fitz-Gibbon and Reay 1982), three quarters
of the pupils ranked their liking for French as a school subject
significantly higher after competing a program in which 14-yearold
non-native speakers tutored 1l-year-old non-natives in the
language.
GROUP WORK: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RATIONALE
In addition to pedagogical arguments for the use of group work as
at least a complement to lockstep instruction, there now exists
independent psycholinguistic evidence for group work in SL teaching.
This evidence has emerged from recent work on the role of
comprehensible input in SLA and on the nature of non-native/nonnative
conversation. It is to this work that we now turn.
212 TESOL QUARTERLY
Comprehensible Input in Second Language Acquisition
A good deal of research has now been conducted on the special
features of speech addressed to SL learners by native speakers (NSs)
of the language or by non-native speakers (NNSs) who are more
proficient than the learners are. Briefly, it seems that this linguistic
input to the learner, like the speech that caretakers address to young
children learning their mother tongue, is modified in a variety of
ways to (among other reasons) make it comprehensible. This
modified speech, or foreigner talk, is a reduced or “simplified” form
of the full, adult NS variety and is typically characterized by shorter,
syntactically less complex utterances, higher-frequency vocabulary
items, and the avoidance of idiomatic expressions. It also tends to be
delivered at a slower rate than normal adult speech and to be
articulated somewhat more clearly. (For a review of the research
findings on foreigner talk, see Hatch 1983, Chapter 9; for a review of
similar findings on teacher talk in SL classrooms, see Gaies 1983a
and Chaudron in press.)
It has further been shown that NSs, especially those (like ESL
teachers) with considerable experience in talking to foreigners, are
adept at modifying not just the language itself, but also the shape of
the conversations with NNSs in which the modified speech occurs.
They help their non-native conversational partners both to participate
and comprehend in a variety of ways. For example, they
manage to make topics salient by moving them to the front of an
utterance, saying something like San Diego, did you like it?, rather
than Did you like San Diego? They use more questions than they
would with other NSs and employ a number of devices for
clarifying both what they are saying and what the NNS is saying.
The devices include clarification requests, confirmation checks,
comprehension checks, and repetitions and rephrasing of their own
and the NNSs’ utterances. (For a review of the research on conversational
adjustments to NNSs, see Long 1983a.)
It is important to note that when making these linguistic and
conversational adjustments, speakers are concentrating on communicating
with the NNS; that is, their focus is on what they are saying,
not on how they are saying it. As with parents and elder siblings
talking to young children, the adjustments come naturally from
trying to communicate. While their use seems to grow more
sophisticated with practice, they require no special training.
A recent study by Hawkins (in press) has shown that it is
dangerous to assume that the adjustments always lead to comprehension
by NNSs, even when they appear to have understood, as
judged by the appropriateness of their responses. On the other hand,
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 213
at least two studies (Chaudron 1983 and Long in press) have
demonstrated clear improvements in comprehension among groups
of NNSs as a result of specific and global speech modifications,
respectively. Other research has demonstrated that the modifications
themselves are more likely to occur when the native speaker and the
non-native speaker each start out a conversation with information
the other needs in order for the pair to complete some task
successfully. Tasks of this kind, called two-way tasks (as distinct
from one-way tasks, in which only one speaker has information to
communicate), result in significantly more conversational modifications
by the NS (Long 1980, 1981, 1983 b). This is probably because
the need for the NS to obtain unknown information from the NNS
makes it important for the NS to monitor the NNS’s level of
comprehension and thus to adjust until the NNS’s understanding is
sufficient for performance of his or her part of the task.
There is also a substantial amount of evidence consistent with the
idea that the more language that learners hear and understand or the
more comprehensible input they receive, the faster and better they
learn. (For a review of this evidence, see Krashen 1980, 1982 and
Long 1981, 1983b.) Krashen has proposed an explanation for this,
which he calls the Input Hypothesis, claiming that learners improve
in a SL by understanding language which contains some target
language forms (phonological, lexical, morphological, or syntactic)
which are a little ahead of their current knowledge and which they
could not understand in isolation. Ignorance of the new forms is
compensated for by hearing them used in a situation and embedded
in other language that they do understand:
A necessary condition to move from stage i to stage i + 1 is that the
acquirer understand input that contains i + 1, where “understand” means
that the acquirer is focused on the meaning and not the form of the
utterance (Krashen 1980:170).
Whether or not simply hearing and understanding the new items
are both necessary and sufficient for a learner to use them successfully
later is still unclear. Krashen claims that speaking is unnecessary,
that it is useful only as a means of obtaining comprehensible
input. However, at least one researcher (Swain in press) has argued
that learners must also be given an opportunity to produce the new
forms—a position Swain calls the “comprehensible output [italics
added] hypothesis.” What many researchers do agree upon is that
learners must be put in a position of being able to negotiate the new
input, thereby ensuring that the language in which it is heard is
modified to exactly the level of comprehensibility they can manage.
As noted earlier, the research shows that this kind of negotiation is
perfectly possible, given two-way tasks, in NS/NNS dyads. The
214 TESOL QUARTERLY
problem for classroom teachers, of course, is that it is impossible for
them to provide enough of such individualized NS/NNS opportunities
for all their students. It therefore becomes essential to know
whether two (or more) non-native speakers working together during
group work can perform the same kind of negotiation for meaning.
This question has been one of the main motivations for several
recent studies of NNS/NNS conversation, often referred to in the
literature as interlanguage talk. The focus in these studies of NNSs
working together in small groups is no longer just the quantity of
language practice students are able to engage in, but the quality of
the talk they produce in terms of the negotiation process.
Studies of Interlanguage Talk
An early study of interlanguage talk was carried out by Long,
Adams, McLean, and Casta๑os (1976) in intermediate-level, adult
ESL classes in Mexico. The researchers compared speech samples
from two teacher-led class discussions to speech from two smallgroup
discussions (two learners per group) doing the same task. To
examine the quantity and quality of speech in both contexts, the
researchers first coded moves according to a special category system
designed for the study. Quality of speech was defined by the variety
of moves, and quantity of speech was defined by the number of
moves. The amount and variety of student talk were found to be
significantly greater in the small groups than in the teacher-led
discussions. In other words, students not only talked more, but also
used a wider range of speech acts in the small-group context.
In a larger study, Porter (1983) examined the language produced
by adult learners in task-centered discussions done in pairs. The
learners were all NSs of Spanish. The 18 subjects (12 NNSs and 6
NSs) represented three proficiency levels: intermediate, advanced,
and native speaker. Each subject participated in separate discussions
with a subject from each of the three levels. Porter was thus able to
compare interlanguage talk with talk in NS/NNS conversations, as
well as to look for differences across learner proficiency levels.
Among many other findings, the following are relevant to the
present discussion:
1. With regard to quantity of speech, Porter’s results supported
those of Long, Adams, McLean, and Casta๑os (1976): Learners
produced more talk with other learners than with NS partners. In
addition, learners produced more talk with advanced-level than
with intermediate-level partners, in part because the conversations
with advanced learners lasted longer.
2. To examine quality of speech, Porter measured the number of
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 215
grammatical and lexical errors and false starts and found that
learner speech showed no significant differences across contexts.
This finding contradicts the popular notion that learners are more
careful and accurate when speaking with NSs than when speaking
with other learners.
3. Other analyses focused on the interfactional features of the
discussions; no significant differences were found in the amount of
repair by NSs and learners. Repair was a composite variable,
consisting of confirmation checks, clarification requests, comprehension
checks, and three communication strategies (verification
of meaning, definition request, and indication of lexical uncertainty).
Porter emphasized the importance of this finding, suggesting
that it shows that learners are capable of negotiating repair in a
manner similar to NSs and that learners at the two proficiency
levels in her study were equally competent to do such repair work.
A related and not surprising finding was that learners made more
repairs of this kind with intermediate than with advanced learners.
4. Closer examination of communication strategies, a subset of
repair features, revealed very low frequencies of “appeals for
assistance” (Tarone 1981), redefined for the Porter study to
include verification of meaning, definition request, and indication
of lexical uncertainty. In addition, learners made the appeals
in similar numbers whether talking to NSs or to other learners (28
occurrences in four and a quarter hours with NSs versus 21
occurrences in four and a half hours with other learners. ) Porter
suggested that her data contradict the notion that other NNSs are
not good conversational partners because they cannot provide
accurate input when it is solicited. In fact, however, learners
rarely ask for help, no matter who their interlocutors may be. It
would appear that the social constraints that operate to keep
foreigner-talk repair to a minimum (McCurdy 1980) operate
similarly in NNS/NNS discussions.
5. Further evidence of these social constraints is the low frequency
of other-correction by both learners and NSs. Learners corrected
1.5 percent and NSs corrected 8 percent of their interlocutors’
grammatical and lexical errors. Also of interest is the finding that
learners miscorrected only .3 percent of the errors their partners
made, suggesting that miscorrections are not a serious threat in
unmonitored group work.
6. The findings on repair were paralleled by those on another
interactive feature, labeled prompts, that is, words, phrases, or
sentences added in the middle of the other speaker’s utterance to
continue or complete that utterance. Learners and NSs provided
similar numbers of prompts. One significant difference, however,
216 TESOL QUARTERLY
was that learners prompted other learners five times more than
they prompted NSs; thus, learners got more practice using this
conversational resource with other learners than they did with
NSs.
Overall, Porter concluded that although learners cannot provide
each other with the accurate grammatical and sociolinguistic input
that NSs can, learners can offer each other genuine communicative
practice, including the negotiation for meaning that is believed to
aid SLA. Confirmation of Porter’s findings has since been provided
in a small-scale replication study by Wagner (1983).
Two additional studies of interlanguage talk (Varonis and Gass
1983, Gass and Varonis in press) should be mentioned. In the first
study, the researchers compared interlanguage talk in 11 non-native
conversational dyads with conversation in 4 NS/NNS dyads and 4
NS/NS dyads. Like the learners in Porter’s (1983) study, the NNSs
were students from two levels of an intensive English program;
unlike Porter’s subjects, these learners were from two native language
backgrounds (Japanese and Spanish). Varonis and Gass
tabulated the frequency of what they term nonunderstanding routines,
which indicate a lack of comprehension and lead to negotiation
for meaning through repair sequences.
The main finding in the Varonis and Gass study was a greater
frequency of negotiation sequences in non-native dyads than in
dyads involving NSs. The most negotiation occurred when the
NNSs were of different language backgrounds and different proficiency
levels; the next highest frequency was in pairs sharing a
language or proficiency level; and the lowest frequency was in pairs
with the same language background and proficiency level. On the
basis of these findings, Varonis and Gass argue for the value of
non-native conversations as a nonthreatening context in which
learners can practice language skills and make input comprehensible
through negotiation.
Building on this study, Gass and Varonis (in press) next examined
negotiation by NNSs in two additional communication contexts:
what Long (1981) calls one-way and two-way tasks. In the one-way
task, one member of a dyad or triad described a picture which the
other member(s) drew. In the two-way task, each member heard
different information about a robbery, and the dyad/triad was to
determine the identity of the robber. The participants, who were
grouped into three dyads and one triad, were nine intermediate
students from four different language backgrounds in an intensive
ESL program.
Gass and Varonis looked for differences in the frequency of negotiation
sequences across the two task types; they found that there
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 217
were more indicators of nonunderstanding in the one-way task, but
the difference was not statistically significant. They suggest that
there may have been more need for negotiation on the one-way task
because of the lack of shared background information. A second
concern in the study was the role of the participant initiating the
negotiation. The finding was not surprising: The student drawing
the picture in the one-way task used far more indicators of nonunderstanding
than the describer did. A third finding related to the oneway
task was a decrease in the number of nonunderstanding
indicators on the second trial: Familiarity with the task seemed to
decrease the need for negotiation, even though the roles were
switched, with the students doing the describing and those doing the
drawing changing places.
As in their earlier study, Gass and Varonis argue that negotiation
in non-native exchanges is a useful activity in that it allows the
learners to manipulate input. When input is negotiated, they maintain,
conversation can then proceed with a minimum of confusion;
additionally, the input will be more meaningful to the learners
because of their involvement in the negotiation process.
The importance of learners’ being able to adjust input by providing
feedback on its comprehensibility was also stressed by Gaies
(1983b). Gaies examined learner feedback to teachers on referential
communication tasks. The participants were ESL students of various
ages and proficiency levels and their teachers, grouped into 12
different dyads and triads. The students were encouraged to ask for
clarification or re-explanation wherever necessary to complete the
task of identifying and sequencing six different designs described
by the teacher. On the basis of the audiotaped data, Gaies developed
an inventory of learner verbal feedback consisting of 4 basic
categories (responding, soliciting, reacting, and structuring) and 19
subcategories. Of interest here are Gaies’ findings that 1) learners
used a variety of kinds of feedback, with reacting moves being the
most frequent and structuring moves the least frequent, and 2)
learners varied considerably in the amount of feedback they provided.
In another study of non-native talk in small-group work, this time
in a classroom setting, Pica and Doughty (in press) compared
teacher-fronted discussions and small-group discussions on (oneway)
decision-making tasks. Their data were taken from three
classroom discussions and three small-group discussions (four students
per group) involving low-intermediate-level ESL students.
Their findings on grammaticality and amount of speech are similar
to those of Porter (1983). Pica and Doughty found that student
production, as measured by the percentage of grammatical T-units
218 TESOL QUARTERLY
(Hunt 1970) per total number of T-units, was equally grammatical in
the two contexts. In other words, students did not pay closer
attention to their speech in the teacher’s presence. In terms of the
amount of speech, Pica and Doughty found that the individual
students talked more in their groups than in their teacher-fronted
discussions, confirming previous findings of a clear advantage for
group work in this area.
Pica and Doughty also examined various interfactional features in
the discussions. They found a very low frequency of comprehension
and confirmation checks and clarification requests in both contexts
and pointed out that such interfactional negotiation is not necessarily
useful input for the entire class, as it is usually directed by and at
individual students. In the teacher-led context, it serves only as a
form of exposure for other class members, who may or may not be
listening, whereas such negotiated input directed at a learner in a
small group is far more likely to be useful for that learner. Finally, an
examination of other-corrections and completions showed those
features to be more typical of group work than of teacher-led
discussions, thus supporting the arguments for learners’ conversational
competence made by Porter and by Varonis and Gass.
In a follow-up study, Doughty and Pica (1984) compared language
use in teacher-fronted lessons, group work (four students per
group), and pair work on a two-way task. The participants, who had
the same level of proficiency as those in Pica and Doughty (in
press), had to give and obtain information about how flowers were
to be planted in a garden. Each started with an individual felt board
displaying a different portion of a master plot. At the end of the
activity, all participants were supposed to have constructed the
same picture, which they compared against the master version then
shown to them for the first time. The researchers compared their
findings with those from their earlier study, in which a one-way task
had been used.
Doughty and Pica found that the two-way task generated significantly
more negotiation work than the one-way task in the smallgroup
setting but found no effect for task type in the teacher-led
lessons. Negotiation was defined as the percentage of “conversational
adjustments”; these adjustments included clarification requests,
confirmation checks, comprehension checks, self- and otherrepetitions
(both exact and semantic), over the total number of
T-units and fragments. Clarification requests, confirmation checks,
and comprehension checks, in particular, increased in frequency
(from a total of 6 percent to 24 percent of all T-units and fragments
in the small groups) with the switch to a two-way task in the second
study.
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 219
When task type was held constant, Doughty and Pica found that
significantly more negotiation work (again measured by the ratio of
conversational adjustments to total T-units and fragments) occurred
in the small group (66 percent) and in pair work (68 percent) than in
the lockstep format (45 percent), but that the difference in amounts
between the small group and pair work was not statistically significant.
More total talk was generated in teacher-fronted lessons than
in small groups on both types of task, and more total talk on twoway
than on one-way tasks in both teacher-fronted and small-group
discussions. However, the 33 percent increase in the amount of talk
in the small groups for the two-way task was six times greater than
the 5 percent increase provided by the two-way task in teacher-led
lessons. Teacher-fronted lessons on a two-way task generated the
most language use, and small-group discussion on a one-way task
produced the least. As Doughty and Pica noted, however, the high
total output in the teacher-fronted, one-way discussions was largely
achieved by close to 50 percent of the talk being produced by the
teachers, whereas teachers could not and did not dominate in this
way on the garden-planting (two-way) task. Thus, students talked
more on the two-way task, whether working with their teachers or in
the four-person groups.
Doughty and Pica also noted that negotiation work as a percentage
of total talk was lower in teacher-fronted lessons on both oneway
and two-way tasks. This finding, they suggested, may indicate
that students are reluctant to indicate a lack of understanding in
front of their teacher and an entire class of students and for that
reason do not negotiate as much comprehensible input in wholeclass
settings. This suggestion was supported by the researchers’
informal assessment of students’ actual comprehension, as judged
by their lower success rate on the garden-planting task in the
teacher-led than in the small-group discussions. Doughty and Pica
concluded by emphasizing the importance not of group work per
se, but of the nature of the task which the teacher provides for
work done in small groups.
Finally, two nonquantitative studies have contributed insights into
interlanguage talk. Bruton and Samuda (1980) studied errors and
error treatment in small-group discussions based on various problemsolving
tasks. Their learners were adults from a variety of language
backgrounds, studying in an intensive course. The main findings
were that 1) learners were capable of correcting each other successfully,
even though their teachers had not instructed them to do so,
and 2) learners were able to employ a variety of different errortreatment
strategies, among which were the offering of straight
alternatives (i. e., explicit corrections) and the use of repair questions.
220 TESOL QUARTERLY
In general, the learners’ treatments were much like those of their
teachers, except that the most frequent errors treated by the learners
were lexical items, not syntax or pronunciation. Bruton and Samuda
also noted that in ten hours of observation, only once was a correct
item changed to an incorrect one by a peer; furthermore, students
did not pick up many errors from each other, a finding also reported
by Porter (1983). Bruton and Samuda make the point that while
learners seemed able to deal with apparent, immediate breakdowns
in communication, several other, more subtle types of breakdown
occurred which the students did not (and probably could not) treat.
They suggest that learners be given an explanation of the various
kinds of communication breakdowns that can occur, that they be
taught strategies for coping with them, and that they be given
explicit error-monitoring tasks during group work.
Somewhat related to this work on error treatment is the analysis
by Morrison and Low (1983) of monitoring in non-native discussions.
Morrison and Low point out that their subjects, in addition to
monitoring their own speech, self-correcting for lexis, syntax, discourse,
and truth value without feedback from others and in a highly
communicative context, also monitored the output of their interlocutors.
This interactive view of monitoring, of making the struggle to
communicate “a kind of team effort” (243), includes the kind of
negotiation that Varonis and Gass are describing. The transcripts
presented by Morrison and Low, however, show a wide divergence
in the extent to which groups pay attention to and provide feedback
on their members’ speech. While some groups seemed to be
involved in the topic and helped each other out at every lapse, other
groups appeared totally absorbed in their own thoughts and inattentive
to the speaker’s struggles to communicate.
Summary of Research Findings
The research findings reviewed above appear to support the
following claims:
Quantity of practice. Students receive significantly more individual
language practice opportunities in group work than in lockstep
lessons (Long, Adams, McLean, and Casta๑os 1976, Doughty and
Pica 1984, Pica and Doughty in press). They also receive significantly
more practice opportunities in NNS/NNS than in NS/NNS dyads
(Porter 1983), more when the other NNS has greater rather than
equal proficiency in the SL (Porter 1983), and more in two-way than
in one-way tasks (Doughty and Pica 1984).
Variety of practice. The range of language functions (rhetorical,
pedagogic, and interpersonal) practiced by individual students is
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 221
wider in group work than in lockstep teaching (Long, Adams,
McLean, and Casta๑os 1976).
Accuracy of student production. Students perform at the same level
of grammatical accuracy in their SL output in unsupervised group
work as in “public” lockstep work conducted by the teacher (Pica
and Doughty in press). Similarly, the level of accuracy is the same
whether the interlocutor in a dyad is a native or a non-native speaker
(Porter 1983).
Correction. The frequency of other-correction and completions by
students is higher in group work than in lockstep teaching (Pica and
Doughty in press) and is not significantly different with NS and
NNS interlocutors in small-group work, being very low in both
contexts (Porter 1983). There seems to be considerable individual
variability in the amount of attention students pay to their own and
others’ speech (Gaies 1983b, Morrison and Low 1983), however, and
some indication that training students to correct each other can help
remedy this (Bruton and Samuda 1980). During group work, learners
seem more apt to repair lexical errors, whereas teachers pay an
equal amount of attention to errors of syntax and pronunciation
(Bruton and Samuda 1980). Learners almost never mis correct during
unsupervised group work (Bruton and Samuda 1980, Porter 1983).
Negotiation. Students engage in more negotiation for meaning in the
small group than in teacher-fronted, whole-class settings (Doughty
and Pica 1984). NNS/NNS dyads engage in as much or more
negotiation work than NS/NNS dyads (Porter 1983, Varonis and
Gass 1983). In small groups, learners negotiate more with other
learners who are at a different level of SL proficiency (Porter 1983,
Varonis and Gass 1983) and more with learners from different first
language backgrounds (Varonis and Gass 1983).
Task. Previous work on NS/NNS conversation has found two-way
tasks to produce significantly more negotiation work than one-way
tasks (Long 1980, 1981). The findings for interlanguage talk have
been less clear, with one study (Gass and Varonis in press) not
finding this pattern and another (Pica and Doughty in press)
appearing not to do so, but actually not employing a genuine twoway
task. The latest study of this issue (Doughty and Pica 1984),
which did use a two-way task, that is, one requiring information
exchange by both or all parties, supports the original claim for the
importance of task type, with the two-way task significantly increasing
the amount of talk, the amount of negotiation work, and—to
judge impressionistically—the level of input comprehended by
students, as measured by their task achievement. Finally, it seems
that familiarity with a task decreases the amount of negotiation
work it produces (Gass and Varonis in press).
222 TESOL QUARTERLY
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CLASSROOM
The research findings on interlanguage talk generally support the
claims commonly made for group work. Increases in the amount
and variety of language practice available through group work are
clearly two of its most attractive features, and these have obvious
appeal to teachers of almost any methodological persuasion.
The fact that the level of accuracy maintained in unsupervised
groups has been found to be as high as that in teacher-monitored,
lockstep work should help to allay fears that lower quality is the
price to be paid for higher quantity of practice. The same is true of
the findings that monitoring and correction occur spontaneously
(although variably) in group work and that it seems possible to
improve both through student training in correction techniques, if
that is thought desirable. The apparently spontaneous occurrence of
other-correction probably diminishes the importance sometimes
attached to designation of one student in each group as leader, with
special responsibility for monitoring accuracy. However, group
leaders may still be needed for other reasons, such as ensuring that a
task is carried out in the manner the teacher or materials writer
intended. (See Long 1977 for further details concerning the logistics
of organizing group work in the classroom. )
For many teachers, of course, concern about errors occurring
and/or going uncorrected has diminished in recent years, since
second language acquisition research has shown errors to be an
inevitable, even “healthy,” part of language development. In fact,
some teachers have been persuaded by theories of second language
acquisition, such as Krashen’s (1982) Monitor Theory, and/or by
new teaching methods, such as the Natural Approach (Krashen and
Terrell 1983), to focus exclusively on communicative language use
from the very earliest stages of instruction. Many others, while not
abandoning attention to form altogether, are eager to ensure that
their lessons contain sizable portions of communication work, even
though this will inevitably involve errors.
For such teachers, the most interesting findings of the research on
interlanguage talk do not concern quantity and variety of language
practice or accuracy and correction, but rather, the negotiation
work in NNS/NNS conversation. The findings of each of five
studies which have looked at the issue of whether learners can
accomplish as much or more of this kind of practice working
together as with a NS are very encouraging.
The related finding that students of mixed SL proficiencies tend to
obtain more practice in negotiation than same-proficiency dyads
suggests that when students with the same needs are working in small
groups on the same materials or tasks, teachers of mixed-ability
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 223
classes would do well to opt for heterogeneous (over homogeneous)
ability grouping, unless additional considerations dictate otherwise.
The fact that groups of mixed native language backgrounds tend to
achieve greater amounts of negotiation also suggests grouping of
students of mixed language backgrounds together where possible.
For many teachers of multilingual classes, this would in any case be
preferable, since it is one means of avoiding the development of
“classroom dialects” intelligible only to speakers of a common first
language—a phenomenon also avoidable through students having
access to speakers of other target language varieties in lockstep
work or outside the classroom.
The finding concerning mixed first language groups does not
mean, of course, that group work will be unsuccessful in monolingual
classrooms, which is the norm in many EFL situations.
To reiterate, the research shows clearly that the kind of negotiation
work of interest here is also very successfully obtained in groups of
students of the same first language background. Things simply seem
slightly better with mixed language groups.
Finally, the findings of research to date on interlanguage talk offer
mixed evidence for the claimed advantages of two-way over oneway
tasks in NS-NNS conversation. However, recent work on this
issue seems to indicate that the claims are probably justified in the
NNS-NNS context, too. Further, it appears to be the combination of
small-group work (including pair work) with two-way tasks that is
especially beneficial to learners in terms of the amount of talk
produced, the amount of negotiation work produced, and the
amount of comprehensible input obtained.
In this light, teachers might think it desirable to include as many
two-way tasks as possible among the activities students carry out in
small groups. It is obviously useful to have students work on oneway
tasks, such as telling a story which the listener does not know or
describing a picture which the listener attempts to draw on the basis
of the description alone. However, because one participant starts
with all the information in such tasks, the other group members have
nothing to “bargain” with; this limits the ability of the latter to
negotiate the way the conversation develops. (Some one-way tasks
in fact become monologues rather than conversations.)
In conclusion, it should be remembered that group work is not a
panacea. Teacher-fronted work is obviously useful for certain kinds
of classroom activities, and poorly conceived or organized group
work can be as ineffective as badly run lockstep lessons. Furthermore,
additional information is still needed on such issues as the
optimum size, composition, and internal organization of groups;
about the structuring and management of tasks to be done in groups;
224 TESOL QUARTERLY
and about the relationship between group work and teacher-led
instruction.
Despite these caveats, the authors are encouraged by the initial
findings of what we hope will develop into a coherent and cumulative
line of classroom-oriented research: studies of interlanguage
talk. Together with theoretical advances concerning the role of
input in second language acquisition, the studies we have reviewed
have already contributed a psycholinguistic rationale to the existing
pedagogical arguments for group work in the SL classroom.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 18th Annual TESOL Convention
in Houston, March 1984.
THE AUTHORS
Michael H. Long is Assistant Professor in the ESL Department at the University of
Hawaii and Director of the Center for Second Language Classroom Research in the
University’s Social Science Research Institute. He is a member of the Editorial
Advisory Boards of the TESOL Quarterly and Studies in Second Language
Acquisition. He is also co-editor of Issues in Second Language Research (Newbury
House Publishers, Inc.) and of the new Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series
(Cambridge University Press).
Patricia A. Porter, Assistant Professor of English, coordinates the MA/TEFL
Program and the ESL Program at San Francisco State University and teaches in
both programs. Her research interests include interlanguage talk, and her most
recent publication is an ESL oral communication text.
REFERENCES
Barnes, Douglas. 1973. Language in the classroom. Bletchley, England:
Open University Press.
Bruton, Anthony, and Virginia Samuda. 1980. Learner and teacher roles in
the treatment of oral error in group work. RELC Journal 11(2):49-63.
Chaudron, Craig. 1983. Simplification of input: topic reinstatements and
their effects on L2 learners’ recognition and recall. TESOL Quarterly
17(3):437-458.
Chaudron, Craig. In press. Second language classroom research. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
GROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 225
Doughty, Catherine, and Teresa Pica. 1984. Information gap tasks: do they
facilitate second language acquisition? Paper presented at the 18th
Annual TESOL Conference, Houston, March 1984.
Fanselow, John F. 1977. Beyond Rashomon— conceptualizing and describing
the teaching act. TESOL Quarterly 11(1):17-39.
Fitz-Gibbon, C. I., and D.G. Reay. 1982. Peer-tutoring: brightening up FL
teaching in an urban comprehensive school. British Journal of Language
Teaching 20(1):39-44.
Flanders, Ned. 1970. Analyzing teaching behavior. Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison-Wesley.
Gaies, Stephen J. 1983a. The investigation of language classroom processes.
TESOL Quarterly 17(2): 205-217.
Gaies, Stephen J. 1983b. Learner feedback: an exploratory study of its role
in the second language classroom. In Classroom oriented research in
second language acquisition, Herbert W. Seliger and Michael H. Long
(Eds.), 190-213. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Gass, Susan, and Evangelize Marlos Varonis. In press. Negotiation of
meaning in non-native speaker—non-native speaker conversation. In
Input and second language acquisition, Susan Gass and Carolyn Madden
(Eds.). Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Hatch, Evelyn. 1983. Psycholinguistics: a second language perspective.
Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Hawkins, Barbara. In press. Is an “appropriate response” always so
appropriate? In Input and second language acquisition, Susan Gass and
Carolyn Madden (Eds.). Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers,
Inc.
Hoetker, James, and William P. Ahlbrand. 1969. The persistence of the
recitation. American Educational Research Journal 6(1):145-167.
Hunt, Kellogg W. 1970. Syntactic maturity in school children and adults.
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 53:1
(Serial No. 134).
Krashen, Stephen D. 1980. The input hypothesis. In Georgetown Roundtable
on Languages and Linguistics, James E. Alatis (Ed.), 168-180.
Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press.
Krashen, Stephen D. 1982. Principles and practice in second language
acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Krashen, Stephen D., and Tracy Terrell. 1983. The natural approach:
language acquisition in the classroom. New York: Pergamon Press.
Littlejohn, Andrew P. 1982. Teacherless language learning groups: an
experiment. Manuscript, University of Lancaster.
Littlejohn, Andrew P. 1983. Increasing learner involvement in course
management. TESOL Quarterly 17(4):595-608.
Long, Michael H. 1975. Group work and communicative competence in the
ESOL classroom. In On TESOL ’75, Marina Burt and Heidi Dulay
(Eds.), 211-233. Washington, D. C.: TESOL.
Long, Michael H. 1977. Group work in the teaching and learning of English
as a foreign language—problems and potential. English Language Teaching
Journal 31(4):285-292.
226 TESOL QUARTERLY
Long, Michael H. 1980. Input, interaction and second language acquisition.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
Long, Michael H. 1981. Input, interaction, and second language acquisition.
In Native language and foreign language acquisition, Harris Winitz
(Ed.). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 379:250-278.
Long, Michael H. 1983a. Linguistic and conversational adjustments to nonnative
speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 5(2):177-193.
Long, Michael H. 1983b. Native speaker/non-native speaker conversation
in the second language classroom. In On TESOL ’82, Mark A. Clarke and
Jean Handscombe (Eds.), 207-225. Washington, D. C.: TESOL.
Long, Michael H. In press. Input and second language acquisition theory.
In Input and second language acquisition, Susan Gass and Carolyn
Madden (Eds.). Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers,
Inc.
Long, Michael H., Leslie Adams, Marilyn McLean, and Fernando Casta๑os.
1976. Doing things with words: verbal interaction in lockstep and small
group classroom situations. In On TESOL ’76, Ruth Crymes and John
Fanselow (Eds.), 137-153. Washington, D. C.: TESOL.
Long, Michael H., and Charlene Sato. 1983. Classroom foreigner talk
discourse: forms and functions of teachers’ questions. In Classroom
oriented research in second language acquisition, Herbert W. Seliger and
Michael H. Long (Eds.), 268-285. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury
House Publishers, Inc.
McCurdy, Peggy L. 1980. Talking to foreigners: the role of rapport. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Mehan, Hugh. 1979. “What time is it, Denise?”: asking known information
questions in classroom discourse. Theory into Practice 18(4):285-294.
Morrison, Donald M., and Graham Low. 1983. Monitoring and second
language learners. In Language and communication, Jack C. Richards
and Richard W. Schmidt (Eds.), 228-250. New York: Longman.
Pica, Teresa, and Catherine Doughty. In press. Input and interaction in the
communicative language classroom: a comparison of teacher-fronted
and group activities. In Input and second language acquisition, Susan
Gass and Carolyn Madden (Eds.). Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury
House Publishers, Inc.
Porter, Patricia A. 1983. Variations in the conversations of adult learners of
English as a function of the proficiency level of the participants. Ph.D.
dissertation, Stanford University.
Rowe, Mary Budd. 1974. Pausing phenomena: influence on the quality of
instruction, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 3(2):203-224.
Swainj Merrill. In press. Communicative competence: some roles of
comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In
Input and second language acquisition, Susan Gass and Carolyn Madden
(Eds.). Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Tarone, Elaine E. 1981. Some thoughts on the notion of communication
strategy. TESOL Quarterly 15(3):285-295.
Varonis, Evangelize Marlos, and Susan Gass. 1983. “Target language” input
from non-native speakers. Paper presented at the 17th Annual TESOL
Convention, Toronto, March 1983.
CROUP WORK, INTERLANGUAGE TALK, AND SLA 227
Wagner, Mary. 1983. Input and interaction in the speech modifications
made by NNS-NNS. Term paper for ESL 650. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii, Department of ESL.
White, Joanna, and Patsy M. Lightbown. 1983. Asking and answering in
ESL classes. Canadian Modern Language Review 40(2):228-244.
From TESOL QUARTERLY