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.

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