The Significance of Adjacency Pairs in Teacher-Student Interactions

27 utterances need not be confirmation checks; they might simply function as conversational continuants Ellis, 2008:451. .....negotiation for meaning, and especially negotiation work that triggers interactional adjustments by the NS or more competent interlocutor, facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways. Internationally modified input works for acquisition when: 1 it assists learners to notice linguistic forms in the input, and 2 the forms that are noticed lie within the learner‟s processing capacity Long, 1996. In their research results, Polio and Gass 1998 suggested that learners comprehend better when they have control over the content and form of the discourse.

3. Comprehensible Output Hypothesis

Output indicates the outcome of what the student has learned. Comprehensible output hypothesis constructs by Swain 1985 as the complement to Krashen‟s Input Hypothesis. She argued that comprehensible input alone was insufficient to ensure that learners achieved high levels of grammatical and sociolinguistic competence. Based on her research, she found that the learners fail to develop marked grammatical distinctions in French. She speculated that it might be because the learners had limited opportunity to talk in the classroom and were not „pushed‟ in the output they produced. Swain proposed that production especially pushed output may encourage learners to move from semantic top-down to take place with little syntactic analysis of the input. Production forces learners to pay attention to the mean of expression especially if they are „pushed‟ to produce messages that are concise and socially appropriate Swain, 1995 cited in Ellis, 2008:261. Production 28 requires learners to process syntactically; they have to pay some attention to the form of language Swain, 1995 cited in Ellis, 2008:261. Production has six roles: 1 It serves to generate better input through the feedback that learner‟s efforts at production elicit, 2 It forces syntactic processing i.e. it obliges learners to pay attention to grammar, 3 It allows learners to test out hypotheses about the target language grammar, 4 It helps to automotive existing L2 knowledge, 5 It provides opportunities for learners to develop discourse skills, for example by producing „long turns‟, 6 It is important for helping learners to develop a „personal voice‟ by steering conversations onto topics they are interested in contributing to. Swain claimed that the basic instructional pattern in class was one in which teachers talked a great deal and students got to say very little. It means that teacher needs to provide much exposure through their talk. This exposure will equip the students for their language production. On her observations, Swain formulated an alternative hypothesis of „comprehensible output‟ hypothesis. She suggests that the opportunities to produce language were important for acquisition Swain, 1995 cited in Nunan, 2001:90. She added, „Being pushed to produce output obliges learners to test hypotheses and refine their developing knowledge of the language system‟. Learners not only need to practice the language, but also to test their hypothesis through practicing whether the language they used is appropriate in the certain context. It has also being claimed that being pushed to produce output obliges learners to cope with their lack of language knowledge by struggling to make themselves understood, by speaking slowly for example, or repeating or clarifying