Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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Box 12.3 The socio-educational model
Key themes
Success in classroom second language acquisition depends on the two main fac-
tors, integrativeness and attitudes to the learning situation, in a complex inter-
action with other factors, such as the student’s ability and the type of learning
context.
Teaching
For some students the emphasis should be on integrativeness; for others, with
say ELF goals, it should be on instrumental motivation. Changing long-standing
motivations in the students is difficult.
12.4 The interaction approach
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What do you do when you do not understand what someone else has just
said?
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What do you do when you think you have made a mistake in speaking?
Focusing questions

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The interaction approach to SLA research has evolved for 30 years, primarily in
the USA; it sees talking to other people as the key to acquiring a language. Three
of its loosely connected tenets are explored below.
Language is acquired through interaction
In the 1960s, considerable research looked at how parents interact with children
in the first language, with largely inconclusive results. Direct correction, in 
which the child’s sentence is corrected by the parent, occurs very rarely; in one
famous study by Christine Howe (1981), only 1 of 1,711 utterances by mothers
involved correction. Ursula Bellugi and Roger Brown (1964) did find a process of
‘imitation with expansion’, in which the parent feeds back the child’s sentence in
an altered form:
Child: Baby highchair
Mother: Baby is in the highchair
Others, however, such as Nelson et al. (1973), did not find any beneficial effects
on learning from such exchanges; see Cook and Newson (2007) for a further dis-
cussion. Nevertheless some psychologists, like Jerome Bruner (1983), have insisted
that structured interaction is the driving force in first language acquisition.
What is the role of interaction in the learning of second languages? In 1981
Mike Long suggested that it is not what the learner hears but how they are inter-
acted with that matters (Long, 1981). In its full form this became known as the
interaction hypothesis (Long, 1996): essentially, that second language acquisition
depends on profiting from conversation which makes concessions to the learner
through processes of topic clarification and repair.