The Role and Function of Adjacency Pairs in Teacher-Student Interaction

26 Krashen argued that the value of second language classes lies not only in the grammar instruction, but in the simpler “teacher talk”, that is the comprehensible input. It can be an efficient place to achieve at least for the intermediate levels, as long as the focus of the class is on providing input for acquisition” Krashen, 1982. Krashen claimed that simplified input and context can play a role in making input comprehensible.

2. Interaction Hypothesis

Interaction can facilitate acquisition by assisting learner‟s L2 production Long, 1996. Long 1983 argued that much second language acquisition takes place through conversational interaction. He agrees with Krashen that comprehensible input is necessary for language acquisition. However, he is more concerned with the question of how input is made comprehensible. According to him modified interaction as the necessary mechanism for this to take place. The learners‟ need is not necessarily simplification of the linguistic forms but rather an opportunity to interact with other speakers, in ways which lead them to adapt what they are saying until the learner shows signs of understandings. The general claim of interaction hypothesis is that engaging in interpersonal oral interaction in which communication problems arise and are negotiated facilitates incidental language acquisition. Interactive input is more important than non- interactive input because it supplied learners with information relating to linguistic forms that were problematic to them. Interactional modifications may remove the need for learners to develop their linguistic competence and thus have a negative effect on acquisition. For example, modified repetitions of learner 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