24.3064, Review: Applied Linguistics: Mackey & McDonough (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-3064. Mon Jul 29 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.3064, Review: Applied Linguistics: Mackey & McDonough (2013)

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Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 09:59:13
From: Yi Xu [xuyi at pitt.edu, yi.xu at ucl.ac.uk]
Subject: Second Language Interaction in Diverse Educational Contexts

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-1273.html

EDITOR: Kim  McDonough
EDITOR: Alison  Mackey
TITLE: Second Language Interaction in Diverse Educational Contexts
SERIES TITLE: Language Learning & Language Teaching 34
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Yi Xu, University of Pittsburgh

SUMMARY

When it comes to the topic of interaction in foreign language teaching and
learning, one might easily expect research on teacher-student or
student-student face-to-face communication in classrooms. “Second Language
Interaction in Diverse Educational Contexts”, edited by Kim McDonough and
Alison Mackey, approaches “interaction” more broadly. Aiming at adding novelty
and diversity to what is typically discussed in the field of interaction work,
each chapter notes some perspectives that had not been taken in previous
studies. “Educational contexts” in different chapters include traditional
classrooms, computer laboratories, and conversation pairs or groups for both
learning and testing purposes.

The book is divided into three sections. The first six chapters focus on
interaction in second language (L2) classrooms. Chapters 7 to 11 deal with
interaction involving technology, including interpersonal communication
enabled by technology (i.e. computer-mediated communication), as well as
interactions between learners and technology. The last four chapters feature
studies on interaction among collaborative pairs or groups for proficiency and
placement test purposes, as well as research that examines interactional
patterns among conversational groups outside the classroom.

Chapter 1, “Promoting attention to form through task repetition in a Korean
EFL context,” by Youjin Kim, investigates how task variables affect the
emergence of language-related episodes (LRE) in collaborative tasks. Noting
that previous studies did not always differentiate the repetition of task
content from the repetition of procedure in target-based language teaching
(TBLT), Kim compares the interactional patterns of two participant groups,
with one group experiencing three tasks with procedure repetition only, and a
second group experiencing task content repetition. The study finds that
repeating the task content produced more LREs (particularly lexical LREs) than
repeating the procedure only. In addition to reporting quantitative data with
number of LREs as a measure, the author also discusses student and teacher
responses qualitatively. Students perceived task content repetition with less
interest than procedure repetition, as they tended to lose motivation and
willingness to communicative over time, while the teacher indicated that the
activities would have been more helpful if key vocabulary, expression, and
grammar points needed for the task were introduced before students engaged in
those tasks.

Chapter 2, “Language-related episodes during collaborative tasks: A comparison
of CLIL and EFL learners,” by María Basterrechea and María del Pilar García
Mayo, compared LREs as a result of collaboration in two different learning
environments, namely, in a traditional English as a foreign language (EFL)
program and in a content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL) program.  A
CLIL program, according to the authors, “encompasses the learning of a
non-language subject through a foreign language where the subject and language
have a joint role” (p. 28). The authors assess how LREs affected learners’
production of the present tense –s morphology in a written text reconstruction
task (i.e. dictogloss), which was completed either individually or
collaboratively. They report a positive correlation between the quantity and
quality (i.e. whether the LREs were correctly resolved) of LREs involving the
grammatical feature and the correct use of the feature in written tasks.
Further, Basterrechea and García Mayo observe that CLIL learners produced more
LREs than EFL learners in almost all of the grammatical and lexical LRE
categories, and that under the collaborative text reconstruction condition,
CLIL learners outperformed EFL learners.

Chapter 3, “The impact of increasing task complexity on L2 pragmatic moves,”
by Roger Gilabert and Júlia Barón, makes connections between task complexity,
interaction, and interlanguage pragmatics. They examine how the increase of
cognitive demands in interactive tasks (i.e. a more complex task versus a
simpler task) affected the pragmatic moves of Catalan/Spanish bilingual L2
learners of English in both quantity and variety. They report that more
complex versions of the tasks resulted in longer interactions, and learners
used a larger number moves, but not necessarily more varieties of moves, when
task demands were higher. Also, increasing the task complexity increased the
use of suggestions and requests, but not other types of moves.

Chapter 4, “Tasks and traditional practice activities in a foreign language
classroom context,” by Mackey et al., incisively points out that despite the
attention given to TBLT, little is known regarding the actual differences in
the learning outcomes of TBLT and traditional activities with rote practice
and memorization. Using learners’ development of question formation (Pienemann
& Johnston, 1987) as a measure, the authors conclude that both activities have
benefits and limitations: traditional practices are beneficial for learners
with anxiety and can transform passive knowledge to active knowledge, while
through tasks, learners can more effectively use structures in context.

Chapter 5, “Building explicit L2 Spanish knowledge through guided induction in
small group and whole class interaction,” by Elvis Wagner and Paul Toth,
examines consciousness-raising analytic talk that promotes explicit knowledge
among learners in small-groups and in teacher-fronted whole class
interactions. Their quantitative analyses show that individual learners’
engagement in tasks varied greatly in terms of the amount of analytic talk,
and those learners who contributed more in small groups were also more engaged
during the whole-class task. Further, Wagner and Toth also demonstrate that
using the L1 during analytic talk was useful.  Meanwhile, their qualitative
analyses show that analytic talk given by learner peers may be helpful, though
the degree of benefit could vary, while analytic talk of the teacher
constantly facilitates learning.

Chapter 6, “Classroom interaction and learning opportunities across time and
space,” by Rob Batstone and Jenefer Philp, analyzes the interactions among 12
adult learners in an English for Academic Purposes program, with repeated
episodes of recorded data over 17 weeks. This study qualitatively compares
interaction in a public space (i.e. teacher-led discourse and group work
involving all members) versus in private space (i.e. interaction within
sub-groups that temporarily disengage themselves from the whole group in order
to resolve issues arising from public discourse, which may involve L1 use or
clarification questions and answers among sub-groups). The authors emphasize
the significance of peer interaction for L2 development, as private space
affords a “safe” environment for learners to try out new forms that they are
less confident with, while teachers in public discourse can provide
authoritative answers to queries. Through observations over time, the
researchers also find that learners repeatedly use particular forms of
interaction over time with different partners, and that multiple layers of
related interaction tend to occur simultaneously.

Chapter 7, “The cyber language exchange: Cross-national computer-mediated
interaction,” by Sannon Sauro, explores how corrective feedback provided
through telecollaboration in text-chat facilitates learners’ attention to
form. In addition to Sweden-based English learners, participants in this study
involved two US-based tutors, an English native speaker enrolled in a teacher
training program, and an L2 speaker of English in graduate school. Sauro
reports that the tutors tended to elaborate their feedback. Possibly due to
the tutor’s own educational background, the English L2 tutor focused more on
target forms in giving feedback, while the native speaker tutor gave feedback
on additional writing features such as spelling and punctuation. Further,
Sauro identifies two types of learners’ responses to corrective feedback:
recognition uptake and application uptake. Recognition uptake occurred much
more often than application uptake, but uptake in general was limited because
many Swedish students prepared pre-composed texts and relied on copying and
pasting in text-chat, thus limiting the opportunities for uptake.

Chapter 8, “Using eye tracking as a measure of foreign language learners’
noticing of recasts during computer-mediated writing conferences”, by Bryan
Smith and Claire Renaud, uses eye tracking as a novel methodology to track
attention in text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC)
between L2 learners and their instructors of Spanish or German. They report
that there was a trend towards a positive relationship between the number of
fixations and posttest success. Regarding their second research question,
about the relationship between recast and fixation, they find that the number
of targets in recasts was associated with fixation duration. The authors
conclude that learners most often fixated on target items in recasts, and that
fixation, rather than the number or difficulty of targets in recasts, predicts
posttest success.

Chapter 9, “A corpus approach to studying structural convergence in task-based
Spanish L2 interaction,” by Joseph Collentine and Karina Collentine, uses
corpus linguistic methods to investigate how advanced Spanish L2 learners’
output exhibits structural alignment to the prime, which are grammatical
structures leading interlocutors to use the same or similar structures (p.
171) in task-based SCMC in a 3-D virtual environment. The linguistic structure
under investigation is complex sentences containing nominal clauses. By
comparing the target-prime proportion and the target-without-prime proportion
in dyads in learners’ SCMC transcripts and in a Spanish L1 corpus, the authors
claim that the learners converged on nominal clauses with a limited number of
epistemic verbs involved, and that they showed more structural alignment than
native speakers. When there is no convergence, L1 speakers used a variety of
structures to communicate, while the L2 learners relied heavily on
cause-and-effect structures. In addition to pointing out that structural
alignment is a learning strategy in interaction for less proficient speakers,
the authors also argue that SCMC in a 3D virtual world promotes syntactic and
discourse strategy development.

Chapter 10, “Preemptive feedback in CALL,” by Trude Heift, examines how
different types of feedback in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
environment affected beginning and early intermediate level German L2 learners
differently. Heift compared the effectiveness of two feedback conditions:
feedback with 3-hints listing the top three most frequently occurring errors
versus feedback with 1-hint listing only the most frequent errors. A control
condition with no preemptive feedback was also used. The results suggest that
both types of feedback were more effective than no feedback, and that
beginning level learners benefited more from preemptive feedback that attends
to form accuracy than intermediate learners. Retrospective interviews also
revealed learners’ positive perception toward such feedback formats.

Chapter 11, “Learner perceptions of clickers as a source of feedback in the
classroom,” by Ellen Johnson Serafini, discusses beginning Spanish L2
learners’ perception of clickers as a form of immediate feedback. Feedback
types crossing two variables including explicitness in feedback (with or
without metalinguistic information) and enhancement (textual response only or
enhanced visual display) were investigated, and questionnaire response data
were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The study reports that
learners’ perceptions regarding the clicker system’s effectiveness were highly
positive. At the same time, learners’ responses varied depending on the
particular type of clicker response that they experienced. The group of
participants that experienced clickers with enhanced visual display perceived
the clicker system most positively.

In Chapter 12, “International engineering graduate students’ interactional
patterns on a paired speaking test: Interlocutors’ perspectives,” Talia Isaacs
investigates the nature of interactions and learners’ perceptions regarding
such interactions among L2 English speakers from different L1 backgrounds when
collaborating in pairs for oral assessment purposes. Three types of pairings
are identified: collaborative, in which engagement was mutual; parallel, in
which both speakers initiated ideas but did not follow up on each other’s
turns; and asymmetric, in which one speaker dominated the conversation while
the other was relatively passive. Isaacs notes that parallel and collaborative
interaction types occurred most often, and that dominant speakers had the
highest estimate of their L2 speaking ability and their time spent using the
target language in daily life. Interlocutors in collaborative pairs perceived
their joint performance most positively, while the dominant members of
asymmetric pairs were the least positive about interaction outcomes.

In Chapter 13, “The effectiveness of interactive group orals for placement
testing,” Paula Winke discusses the reliability and validity of using
task-based group oral performance in placement tests. Inter-rater reliability
was measured using the scores from two sets of raters, and test takers and
student teachers were interviewed so that their responses could be used as
evidence of test validity. Winke reports that ratings in the pronunciation,
fluency, and communication categories from different raters were reliable,
with variations mostly coming from the category of grammatical accuracy
scores. Further, results from the interview suggest that using group orals in
placement tests can generally be successful, though the procedure may be
difficult to implement among lower proficiency level learners because peer
interactions, and negotiating with sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic
competence are often skills that beginning learners lack.

In Chapter 14, “Interaction in conversation groups: The development of L2
conversational styles,”  Ziegler et al. explore the development of L2
conversational features when native speakers of American English learning
German develop their L2 in group conversations outside the classroom. The
authors first note that German conversational styles, in comparison with
American styles, include a more argumentative format and frequent overlapping
utterances from interlocutors (Brynes, 1986; Kotthoff, 1993). The authors find
that through group interactions over six weeks, learners either became more
engaged in conversations, exhibiting more control of the floor or
participating more, or became more passive, if they were less able than the
more advanced learners to adapt to the target language conversation style.
Exit surveys and interviews indicate that despite the lack of uniformity in
learners’ adoption of the German conversation style, almost all learners
perceived interactions within conversation groups positively.

In Chapter 15, “The effectiveness of interactive group orals for placement
testing,”  Kim McDonaugh and Teresa Hernández González analyze English as a
second language (ESL) learners’ group interactions when preservice teachers
acted as conversation facilitators. The authors asked whether the
interactional patterns between teachers and students in such a communicative
context would differ from what might occur in the traditional classroom
context. The authors first defined four types of interactional context:
interaction for communication, for content, for management, and for explicit
language learning. Preservice teachers were found to use comprehension
questions like they traditionally do in classroom discourse, but typically
used them in the language and management context. They also asked referential
and clarification questions in the content and communication contexts, and
such interactions resembled what generally occurs in informal conversations.
Also, preservice teachers talked more than learners in such conversation
groups, and they talked most often in management and language contexts. Based
on such evidence, the authors suggest that the preservice teachers were likely
to have perceived their role more as traditional classroom teachers rather
than facilitators.

EVALUATION

The volume makes a significant contribution to the literature in two ways.
First, as the editors of the book point out, each chapter points out a gap in
the existing literature, a topic that has not yet been explored, or uses a new
experimental methodology to deal with a long-standing issue. For instance,
Kim, in Chapter 1, notes that teachers’ perspectives are often overlooked in
early discussions of task repetition, and thus includes the teacher’s
viewpoint in addition to the students’ responses. In Chapter 8, while eye
tracking has been extensively used in psycholinguistic studies, Smith and
Renaud make the first attempt to use this method to track learners’ attention
in SCMC. The literature review sections of all chapters also give
comprehensive introductions to what has been traditionally done on the topics
in question, allowing readers with or without extensive background on the
subject matter of “interactions in SLA” to equally benefit.

Another positive feature of the volume is its wide range of content scope and
rich variety of experimental and data analysis methods used. At the same time,
it is still easy to identify a coherent theme within the sections, each of
which contains four to six chapters. In terms of content, the second and the
third sections of the volume provide particularly useful examples for those
who wish to explore the application of traditional theories such as the
Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1983, 1996) in different contexts. In contrast,
all chapters in the first section of the volume establish direct comparisons
of different types of interactions in classrooms, in which the TBLT
methodology is often involved. Several studies (e.g. Chapters 1, 3, and 5) use
a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses on different types of
data. Chapter 3 is also unique in that it treats task complexity as a
within-subject variable, while also carefully taking care of carry-over
effects through a Latin Square design.

Due to the range of topics covered, a reference list of terminology used is
necessary. The volume does a fair job in this aspect. Towards the end of the
book, an index of terminology used, together with each item’s place of
occurrence, is given. In some cases, a clear definition can be found, though
not always when it first occurs in the book. For instance, while the notion of
“tasks” occurs almost immediately as one opens the book, readers have to wait
until Chapter 4 to find a clearly articulated explanation of the term, as well
as the related concept of “TBLT.”  Other recurring terminology includes
“recasts,” which are explained by Smith and Renaud in Chapter 8, and “uptake,”
which is explained by Sauro in Chapter 7. At the same time, some recurring
terminology, such as “ecological context” or “ecological validity,” are not
explained explicitly. While these terms are not uncommon in SLA studies, clear
definitions may benefit readers from diverse backgrounds, especially since the
volume can appeal broadly to those interested in classroom practices,
assessment, pragmatics, cognition, and technology.
 
Although the range of topics that the volume covers is impressive, a few
potentially interesting subareas are left unexplored. The chapters in the book
mostly deal with EFL/ESL learners or learners whose L1s and target languages
are both Indo-European languages. One is left to wonder whether similar claims
can be made for learners with disparate linguistic or cultural backgrounds, or
those learning a target language in a different language family. The authors
of several chapters (e.g. Sauro in Chapter 7 and Isaacs in Chapter 12) briefly
mention that different patterns in interaction can be caused by individual
learners’ or language tutors’ cultural and educational backgrounds, but they
do not go on to elaborate how one should consider the role of the learners’ L1
in research and teaching. For instance, could learners who are less active in
oral interaction due to L1 cultural influences benefit more than others in
private space and/or in CMC, where the “threat to face” is less of an issue?
Questions related to L1 background as a variable are not investigated directly
in the volume. Another topic that is not dealt with is “interaction in
communication in the traditional written form.” Since “interaction” in the
volume includes both oral communication as well as CMC, it seems desirable for
discussions of written communication in L2 development to be included to some
extent.

Overall, the novelty in several studies and the variety of experimental
approaches adopted in different chapters encourage scholars familiar with the
“interaction” tradition to consider this concept in new ways. Finally, due to
the background information provided, the volume can also be a useful resource
for researchers and teachers who are relatively new to the subject of
interactional studies in SLA.

REFERENCES

Pienemann, M., & Johnston, M. (1987). Factors influencing the development of
language proficiency. In D. Nunan (Ed.), Applying second language acquisition
research (pp. 45-141). Adelaide: National Curriculum Resource Centre, Adult
Migrant Education Program.

Byrnes, H. (1986). Interactional style in German and American conversations.
Text, 6, 189-206.

Kotthoff, H. (1993). Disagreement and concession in disputes: On the context
sensitivity of preference structures. Language and Society, 22, 193-216.

Long, M. H. (1983). Native speaker/non-native speaker conversation and the
negotiation of comprehensible input. Applied Linguistics, 4, 126-141.

Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language
acquisition. In W. C. Ritchie, & T. K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of Second
Language Acquisition (pp. 413-68). New York, NY: Academic Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Yi Xu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Linguistics at the
University of Pittsburgh. She is interested in foreign language pedagogy,
computer-assisted language learning, corpus linguistics, and in using
psycholinguistic methodologies in second language acquisition.








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