Classroom Interaction, Comprehension, and the Acquisition of L2 Word Meanings

Abstract

There are substantial theoretical and empirical grounds for believing that opportunities to negotiate meaning through interaction facilitate comprehension. However, although there are theoretical grounds for believing that meaning negotiation aids second language acquisition, these are not supported by any empirical evidence. This article reports two classroom studies, based on the same design, which investigated the effects of modified interaction on comprehension and vocabulary acquisition among 79 and 127 high‐school students of English in Japan. The main results were: (a) interactionally modified input resulted in better comprehension than premodified input, (b) interactiqnally modified input led to more new words being acquired than premodified input, (c) learners who actively participated in negotiating meaning did not understand any better than those simply exposed to modified interaction, and (d) the active participators did not learn more new words. These results are discussed in terms of the interaction hypothesis (Long, 1981). The dual‐study method in classroom research is a useful way of establishing which results are generalizable and which are subject to situational variation.