Resultado analítico y experimental de muretes a compresión diagonal

Work on the acquisition value of productive language use, initiated by Swain (1985), has been pursued by a number of cognitive-interactionist researchers. A dual focus on negotiation for meaning and output has been increasingly more common, for example, in the work of Teresa Pica at the University of Pennsylvania and, more recently, in the studies conducted by Kim McDonough at Northern Arizona University. Both contributors have paid close attention to how learners respond to negotiation for meaning moves, or what initially Pica called interlanguage modifications (see Pica, 1992, 1994) and is more frequently known today as output modification (McDonough, 2005). Swain herself has somewhat departed from this line of work by reconceptualizing her Output Hypothesis into a sociocultural framework (Swain, 1995, 2000) that we will examine in Chapter 10. Nevertheless, work by Belgian researcher Kris Van den Branden, Syrian researcher Ali Shehadeh and Japanese researcher Shinichi Izumi has continued to build on three competence-expanding functions for output that Swain (1995, 2000) identified: it promotes noticing of gaps and holes, which in turn pushes learners to revise their utterances; it can carry a metalinguistic function when learners negotiate forms, not only meaning, and reflect upon them; and it facilitates hypothesis testing when new forms are tried out in production and feedback is received from others as to their success and appropriacy.

In a rationale that resembles that of Gass and Varonis (1994) but included pre- and post-test measurement of gains, Van den Branden (1997) posited that the benefits of interaction would be most immediately evident in the quality of the subsequent output produced two hours later after the interaction. The participants were 16 11- and 12-year-old learners of Dutch, most of whom were home speakers of Berber as an L1 and all of whom had been schooled in Dutch since the age of three. They were asked to solve a murder case based on pictures. Eight of the L2 students were paired with a Dutch native-speaking friend from the same class. Another eight did the task one-on-one with the researcher, who systematically provided them with moves that were intended to push their output. A third group of eight students with Dutch as L1 acted as a comparison. The findings showed that all L2 learners extensively modified their output in response to negotiation moves. How they chose to do so depended not so much on whether the interlocutor was a peer or the adult researcher, but on the type of negotiation move they received. For

example, a yes/no acknowledgement was more likely to be issued in response to a confirmation check (e.g. you mean X?), whereas more extensive modification was likely to ensue in response to clarification requests (e.g. pardon me?). Comparing the picture description task done for the pre-test with that of the post-test, Van den Branden found that the two interaction groups produced more language on the post-test (a productivity advantage) and provided more complete information (an information quality advantage). He concluded that negotiation indeed engenders pushed output.

The observation that different types of negotiation moves shape different kinds of interlanguage modifications was initially made by Pica (e.g. Pica et al., 1989). The same idea was later developed by Shehadeh (2001) into a careful taxonomy for the study of learner response to negotiation moves or output modification. For example, the learner may ignore the signal, fail to repair the problem, express difficulty (I don’t know how to say it in English), repeat the previous utterance of the interlocutor without change, insert irrelevant information or branch into a new topic (pp. 455–6). The learner can also respond by modifying her utterance and revising it into a more target-like version, or what has been called repair, as shown in (7):

(7) Learner 1: two small bottle Learner 2: two small what? Learner 1: bot (1.0) small bottles

(Shehadeh, 2001, p. 456)

Shehadeh’s work also drew attention to a type of modification of output that previous research had neglected: self-initiated output modification, or self- initiated repair, a concept that is borrowed from Conversation Analysis (Schegloff et al., 1977). As understood in cognitive-interactionist SLA work, the category refers to an attempt to self-correct that is not prompted by an interlocutor. It can be signalled by a silence, an overt comment like I mean, a cut-off or abandonment of an utterance, or the use of hesitation devices like eh, emm and er (pp. 456–7). For example:

(8) NNS: yes because if the woman is (0.8) the wife always go out (0.6) goes out and left his his husband eh (1.0) her husband and her son in the home (0.7) at home it’s it’s not reasonable for for …

(Shehadeh, 2001, p. 437)

In his studies, Shehadeh has found robust evidence that output modification occurs more frequently as a result of self-initiated repair than as an outcome of other- initiated repair. In a 1999 study, he reports modifications at a higher rate of 2.5 per minute in response to self-initiation than other-initiation (only 1 per minute). In his 2001 study, he found 224 negotiation moves signalling the need for repair versus 535 self-initiated attempts at repair. Furthermore, the other-initiated repair resulted in output modification in 81 per cent of cases, whereas the self-initiated

Learner-initiated negotiation of form 69

repair led to successful output modification (that is, to a more accurate revised form) in 93 per cent of the cases.

Izumi (2003) attempted to conceptualize the pushed output hypothesis within the psycholinguistic framework developed for the L1 by Levelt (1989). Izumi argued that meaningful productive use of the L2 during speaking or writing calls for grammatical encoding and monitoring processes (p. 190). During production, these two processes allow learners to ‘assess the possibilities and limitations of what they can or cannot express in the [target language]’ and in doing so they become ‘an internal priming device for consciousness raising’ that can promote language learning (p. 191). However, given that the psycholinguistic processes of grammatical encoding and monitoring can only be summoned during natural language use, he stipulates that pushed output cannot be expected to be involved in mechanical language use, only in meaningful language use. This claim has been substantiated in a later study by Izumi and Izumi (2004).

Perhaps because different output researchers have pursued different lines of interest and expanded the pushed output hypothesis into diverse directions, the available findings are less compact than the interaction findings reviewed in previous sections. Some years ago Shehadeh (2002) made a call for more research on output modification that directly looks at the link between output and acquisition. More recently, Toth (2006) noted that mounting evidence on ‘the links among metalinguistic knowledge, output, and the L2 implicit system’ (p. 373) is promising and warrants further research attention. To date, however, research on output appears to remain far from the goal of producing systematic accumulation of knowledge via a concerted research programme.