Foreigner Talk in the ESL Classroom: Interactional Adjustment to Adult Students at Two Language Proficiency Levels

While native speakers plainly adjust their speech to accommodate non-native speakers on syntactic and prosodic levels, they are also making adjustments on the level of discourse. It has been argued that these interactional adjustments are the crucial ones to the promotion of language learning. The. present study compared the proportion of nine interactional features used in the speech of four ESL teachers as they taught beginners and advanced level adult classes. As predicted, display questions and self-repetitions were used much less often with advanced students. The lack of other differences in interactional adjustments may be an artifact of the lesson content or teacher style. High variability in teacher behaviour was discovered. The marked reduction in use of display questions at the advanced level provided encouraging evidence that the ESL classroom is, in fact, preparing students for the real, communicative world. Implications for teacher training are pointed out.