The Ability of Grade 12 Students to Modify Their Interlanguage Utterances towards Comprehensibility and/or Target- like Use during Task- based Interaction
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2003-06
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Key Words
- Modification
- Compressibility
- Interlanguage utterances
- Target-like use
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether students modified their
interlanguage utterances towards comprehensibility and/or target -like use when they
experienced difficulty in message comprehensibility during task- based interaction
which involved only students. To this end, twelve students of Grade 12 at Enjibara
Comprehensive, Preparatory and Technic School were selected and participated in the
study. These students were paired up and made to interact using a picture-dictation
task. Their interactions were tape- recorded, transcribed and analysed.
The results of the anlyses indicated that the participants were able to successfully
negotiate for comprehensibility by modifying their trigger utterances in 30(63%)
instances of the one-signal negotiated interactions. The findings of the study also
revealed that when the participants generated modifications of initial utterances, they
made use of target-like forms in 70% of the cases. However, when the rate of
frequency of these modifications which exhibited the use of target-like forms was
compared with the total number of responses made to clarification requests, it was
found minimum, i.e. 44%.
Furthermore, the investigation made to see why the participants did not engage in the
modification of their trigger utterances more often than they did resulted in the
knowledge that a particular type of incomprehension signal called trigger repetition
signal was responsible for this situation. This signal type was found less effective in
prompting the participants to modify their trigger utterances. Of the 48
incomprehension signals made in the one-signal negotiated interactions, 23(48%) of
them were trigger repetition signals. However, only 11(36%) modified comprehensible
output instances were made in response to this signal type. The majority number of
responses (64%) were made in reply to either trigger modification signals or explicitly
marked signals which accounted for 25% (12) and 27% (13) of the total number of
incomprehension signals, respectively.
Finally, conclusions were drawn based on the findings of the study and suggestions
were made for future research on the area.
Description
Keywords
Modification, Compressibility, Interlanguage utterances, Target-like use