INPUT, INTERACTION, AND SECOND‐LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

It is now well established that, under as yet little understood conditions, native speakers modify their speech when addressing non-native speakers. Discussion of native speaker-non-native speaker (NS-NNS) conversation, however, often conflates two related but distinguishable phenomena, input to and interaction with the NNS. Input refers to the linguistic forms used; by interaction is meant the functions served by those forms, such as expansion, repetition, and clarification. This paper explores the possibility that a distinction between these two facets of NS-NNS conversation is important both theoretically, in order better to understand the second-languageacquisition (SLA) process, and in practice, when considering what is necessary and efficient in SL instruction.