NATIVE SPEAKER REACTIONS TO LEARNERS' SPOKEN INTERLANGUAGE 1

Previous studies of the communicative effect of learner language have mainly dealt with native speaker evaluations of the intelligibility of discrete items (typically error types) in learners' written performance. The present study is an attempt to assess a wider range of native speaker reactions to stretches of discourse, produced by Danish learners of English in interview situations. These data were evaluated by 150 native British informants on 14 five-point scales labelled by bipolar adjectives. A factor analysis yielded four factors, which were interpreted as a personality factor, a content factor, a language factor, and a comprehension factor. Results obtained on the language factor and on the comprehension factor were then compared with results obtained from an objective performance analysis of the learner texts. These comparisons indicated that whereas the correlation was highly significant between the language factor and most of the performance features analysed, only one of the performance features correlated significantly with the comprehension factor, viz. communication strategies. This lack of correlation between quantitative measures of learners' performance and evaluations of comprehension was further investigated by means of more qualitative analyses of specific aspects of the texts (errors in lexis, communication strategies, discourse structure).