Native speaker/non-native speaker conversation

and the negotiation of comprehensible input1

MICHAEL H. LONG
University of Hawaii at Manoa

1. INTRODUCTION

Recent years have seen at least forty studies of speech by native speakers (NSs)
addressing non-native speakers (NNSs) of the language of communication (for
review, see Long 1980, 1981a).2 Most researchers report finding the NSs using a
reduced, or 'simplified' variety of their language, commonly observed features of
which include shorter utterances, lower syntactic complexity, and avoidance of
low frequency lexical items and idiomatic expressions (see, e.g. Arthur et al. 1980;
Freed 1978; Gaies 1977; Henzl 1979). Several of the modifications of NS-NS
norms reflect adaptations made by adults talking to young children, although the
functions of caretaker speech often differ from those of speech to foreigners
(Freed 1978).
Speech to non-native speakers (foreigner talk) is sometimes also ungrammatical, as when obligatory functors, such as articles, copula, or other inflectional
morphology are deleted (Ferguson 1975; Meisel 1977). Unlike the earlier kinds of
modifications, however, use of this 'broken' form of a language is restricted,
seeming to occur only when two or more of the following conditions are met: (1)
the non-native speaker has very low or no proficiency in the language of communication; (2) the native speaker is, or thinks s/he is, of higher status than the
non-native speaker; (3) the native speaker has considerable prior foreigner talk
experience, but of a very limited kind; and (4) the conversation occurs
spontaneously, i.e. not as part of a laboratory study (Long 198 lc).
The considerable interest in research on speech modified for non-native
speakers has largely been due to claims that linguistic input which is understood
by the learner, or 'intake' (Corder 1967), is the primary data for second language
acquisition (SLA) (see, e.g. Hatch 1979; Krashen 1980; Larsen-Freeman 1979).
It is widely assumed (although yet to be shown empirically) that at least some of
the speech modifications referred to above are what serve to make input comprehensible. Recent research on NS-NNS conversation, however, suggests that
while understanding may indeed be facilitated by encoding in shorter, syntactically less complex utterances, speech modifications alone are rarely sufficient.
Native speakers also make a lot of adjustments to the interactional structure of
Applied Linguistics, Vol. 4, No. 2.

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Linguistic input probably has to be comprehensible to the learner if it is to serve

as data for second language acquisition. It is widely assumed that input becomes
comprehensible through the speech modifications of native speakers addressing
non-native speakers of the target language. Recent research on native
speaker/non-native speaker conversation suggests, however, that modifications
of the interactional structure of conversation are more important in this regard.
They are more extensive and more-consistently observed than input modifications, and often occur when the latter do not. Fifteen devices for the modification of interaction are described. They are of three kinds: strategies, which serve
to avoid conversational trouble, tactics, which are used to repair the discourse
when trouble occurs, and strategies and tactics, devices which serve both
functions.

MICHAEL H. LONG

127

conversation, and it is modifications of the latter sort that are greater, more consistently observed, and probably more important for providing comprehensible
input. Since the input/interaction distinction (Long 1980) is a fairly recent one, a
brief clarification of the terms is in order.
2. MODIFIED INPUT AND MODIFIED INTERACTION

3 NS : What's the boy's name?

NNS : Uh?
NS : The boy, what's his name?
Describing the same utterances in terms of interaction, we attend to the functions
they serve in conversation. We might now code both as Wh questions, and (2) as
a self-repetition, and perhaps as a topic-comment construction.
When describing linguistic input, therefore, we are considering only the forms
that the learner hears; analysis of interaction means describing the functions of
those forms in (conversational) discourse. Statements about differences in
linguistic input to native speakers and non-native speakers involve direct comparisons of the absolute or relative frequencies of certain forms in two corpora.
Statements about differences in the interactional structure of NS-NS and
NS-NNS conversation first imply identification of the conversational function of
forms within each corpus, followed by comparisons of the absolute or relative
frequencies of those functions across corpora. The analysis of input also involves
a consideration of the native speaker's speech in isolation. Analysis of interaction
necessitates taking the non-native speaker's participation into account, for
identification of turns in conversation as, e.g. other-repetitions, confirmation
checks, comprehension checks, expansions and clarification requests, is only
possible by considering the relationships which utterances enter into with those
preceding and/or following them, including those by the non-native interlocutor.
Distinguishing input and interaction at one stage in the analysis of NS-NNS
conversation does not imply permanent separation. It seems clear, after all, that
several features of each are often related. Thus, Long (1981b) found a native
speaker preference for encoding topic-initiating moves as questions statistically
significantly more often when addressing non-native speakers than other native
speakers. Since English marks simple past tense on the auxiliary (did) in questions
and on the main verb in statements, SL acquirers tend to hear the unmarked
infinitive form more often than native speakers, a factor which may prove to be

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The literature on both first and second language acquisition (SLA) often conflates
two related but distinguishable phenomena: input to, and interaction with a
language acquirer. Input refers to the linguistic forms (morphemes, words, utterances)the streams of speech in the airdirected at the non-native speaker.
Thus, in terms of input, we may wish to describe (1) and (2):
1 What's the boy's name?
2 The boy, what's his name?
as two utterances with a mean length of 5.5 words (or 4.5, depending on how we
are scoring contracted forms), a mean syntactic complexity score of 1 (neither
contains more than one S-node), and with (between them) two instances each of
three grammatical morphemes, article, copula, and possessive, two verbs marked
temporally for present, none for non-present, and so on. Suppose, however, that
(1) and (2) occurred sequentially in NS-NNS conversation, as in (3):

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

related to the relatively late acquisition of what, in English, is a simple, highly

regular form-meaning inflectional relationship.
While input-interaction relationships of this sort clearly exist, it is equally clear
that modification in input and in interaction sometimes occurs independently.
Consider the following conversational fragments:
What time you finish?
NS
NNS Ten o'clock
When did you finish?

Um?
When did you finish?
Ten clock
Ten o'clock?
Yeah
When did you finish?

Ten

(4) shows the type of exchange typical of some observational studies of foreigner
talk, e.g. that between native speaker factory foremen and migrant workers. The
native speaker uses an uninverted Wh question lacking do-support or tense
marking. The question is understood first time, however, probably because of its
routine nature, and the worker's reply closes what is, in interactional terms, a
normal two-part exchange, as shown by the NSNS equivalent in (6). The input
to the non-native speaker in (4) is modified,3 that is, but the interactional structure
of the conversation is not. (5) shows just the opposite, and is, incidentally, typical
of NS-NNS conversational data from the quasi-experimental laboratory studies.
After the native speaker's initial question fails, s/he uses an exact self-repetition,
which succeeds in eliciting an appropriate response from the non-native speaker.
The response is sufficiently ambiguous, however, to make the native speaker
employ a confirmation check (Ten o'clock?), which serves to establish that the
non-native speaker's reply had in fact been correctly heard. The six-turn exchange
involves several modifications of the interactional structure of (6), but not of the
input
Thus far, the two constructs, input and interaction, have been posited on the
basis of hypothetical examples and isolated fragments of data. There follows a
brief summary report of one part of a larger study whose findings provide
quantified empirical support for the distinction.
3. AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF NS-NNS CONVERSATION: INPUT AND INTERACTION4

Method
Controlling for sex and prior foreigner talk experience, 48 adult native speakers
and 16 adult non-native speakers from a variety of first language backgrounds
were randomly assigned to form 32 dyads, 16 NS-NS and 16 NS-NNS, in a
matched-pairs design. Each dyad performed the same six tasks in the same order.
These were: (1) informal conversation, (2) vicarious narrative, (3) giving instructions for two communication games, (4) playing the first game, (5) playing the
second game, and (6) discussing the supposed purpose of the research. About 25
minutes of conversation by each dyad were transcribed for analysis. In testing one
of the larger study's three main research questions, NS-NS and NS-NNS con-

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NS
NNS
NS
NNS
NS
NNS
NS
NS

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MICHAEL H. LONG

versations were compared on 16 features of input and interaction. The findings

are presented in Tables 1-6.
Table I: Four measures of linguistic input across tasks (data from Long 1980)
NS-NNS

NS-NS

Redefined
1^

n
2224
2224

8.36
1.51

7.60
1.42

2369
2369

.71

.65

426.68
3886.91

313 76
4192.96

T=20
T=28
T = 4.5
X= 6
X= 3

16
16
8
8
8

<.OO5
<.025 (n.s.)
>.025 (n.s.)
= .965(n.s)
= .363(n.s.)

Table 2: Numbers and proportions of verbs and copulas on task 1 (data from
Long 1980)
Verbs

NS-NS
(n=16)
NS-NNS
(n=16)

Total

Copulas

89

47.59

98

52.41

187

100

61

37.42

102

62.58

163

100

X2 = 3.28,d= 1, p>.05 (n.s.)

Table 3: Numbers and proportions ofpresent and non-present temporal markings

on verbs on task 1
Present

NS-NS (n= 16)

NS-NNS (n= 16)

Non-present

Total

245
264

68.06
79.76

115
67

31.94
20.24

360
331

100
100

X2= 11.58, df=l,p<.001

Results
Tables 1, 2, and 3 show values across all six tasks for six features of input in
NS-NS and NS-NNS conversation. The statistical significance of differences
between the two corpora was calculated using Wilcoxon's matched-pairs signedranks test (variables 1-3), the sign test (variable 4a and b), and the chi-square test
(variables 5 and 6).
It can be seen that differences on only two of the six input variables attained
significance at the required level (oc = .005)*. In input to NNSs, the average length
of T-units6 was shorter (T = 20, p<.005), and the proportion of verbs marked
temporally for present higher (x2 = 11.58, df = 1, p<.001). Differences between
the two corpora on the other four input variables<lower) syntactic complexity
of T-units, (lower) type-token ratio,7 lexical frequencies of nouns and verbs, and

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1 Average length of T-urats

in words
2 S-nodes per T-unit
3 Type-token ratio (tasks 1 and 2)
4 (a) lexical frequency of nouns
(b) lexical frequency of verbs

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

(higher) proportion of copulas to main verbsgenerally operated in the same

direction, but did not obtain significance at the required level.
Tables 4, 5, and 6 show values across all six tasks for ten features of interaction in NS-NS and NS-NNS conversation. The statistical significance of differences between the two corpora was calculated using the chi-square test (Tables 4
and 5) and Wilcoxon's signed-ranks matched-pairs test (Table 6).
Table 4: Numbers and proportions of questions, statements and imperatives in Tunits on all tasks
Questions

449
728

20.19
29.49
2

78.24
68.00

1740
1679

35
62

Total

1.57
2.51

2224
2469

100
100

= 62.12,df=2,p<.001

Table 5: Question-types in T-units on all tasks

Yes/No

Wh

NS-NS (n= 16)

NS-NNS (n= 16)

66
177

14.70
24.30

214
313

Umn verted

47.66
43.00

137
202

30.51
27.75

Total

Tag

32
36

7.13
4.95

449
728

100
100

16.77,df=3,p<.OOI

Table 6: Eight measures of the modification of the interactional structure of

conversation across six tasks
NS-NS (n = 16)

1 Conversational frames
2 Confirmation checks
3 Comprehension checks
4 Clarification requests
5 Self-repetitions
6 Other-repetitions
7 Expansions
8 17 combined

NS-NNS (n = 16)

510.59
23.00
24.51
11.00
35.81
40.00
0
644.92

85.10
3.83
4.09
1.83
5.97
6.67
0
107.49

485.97
138.54
108.90
62.09
251.14
90.55
34.95
1171.13

81.00
22.92
18.15
10.35
41.06
15.09
5.80
195.19

16
16
15
14
16
14
10
16

71
0
5
0
0
11
0
5

P
>.025 (n.s.)
<.005
<.005
<.005
<.005
<.005
<.005
<005

It will be seen that differences on nine out of ten interaction variables attained
significance at the .005 level or beyond. In the interactional structure of NS-NNS
conversation, the relative frequencies of questions, statements, and imperatives in
T-units differed (x2 = 62.12, df = 2, p<.001), as did the frequencies of questiontypes in T-units (x2 = 16.77, df = 3, p<.001). With non-native interlocutors, NSs
used a non-significantly lower number of conversational frames {Now, Well, So,
etc.) (T = 71, p<.025), but more confirmation checks ( T = 16, p<.005), more
comprehension checks (T = 5, p<.005), more clarification requests (T = O,
p<.005), more self-repetitions (T = 0, p<.005), more other-repetitions (T = 11,

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NS-NS ( n = 16)
NS-NNS (n = 16)

Imperatives

Statements

MICHAEL H. LONG

131

p<.005), more expansions (T = 5, p<.005), and a higher total number of the last
seven devices (T = 5, p<.005).

4 . THE NEGOTIATION OF COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT

It will be recalled that one of the main goals of research on NS-NNS conversation, as on linguistic input to non-native speakers, is to determine how input is
made comprehensible to the acquirer, and thereby (presumably) usable for SLA.
Having established the existence of modifications to the interactional structure of
NS-NNS conversation, some attention will now be paid to the role they play in
providing comprehensible input
Native speakers appear to modify interaction to two main ends: (1) to avoid
conversational trouble, and (2) to repair the discourse when trouble occurs.
Modifications designed to achieve the first purpose reflect prior, long-range

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Discussion
As shown by a review of studies of native speaker speech to non-native speakers
conducted prior to the research reported here (Long 1980), previous findings on
input modifications to non-native speakers have been inconsistent both within and
across studies. Further, NS-NS baseline data, when used at all, have usually been
derived from encounters of a kind different from those which provided the
NS-NNS data. For example, some studies have compared speech to native
speakers and non-native speakers of different ages (children and adults), different
numbers (individuals and classes of students), different degrees of familiarity with
the speaker (friends and strangers), in different roles (teacher, student, friend, conversational partner, research subject), in different settings (office and classroom),
engaged on different tasks (language instruction, informal conversation, discussion), and with different understandings of the purpose of the encounter
(surreptitious and obtrusive recording). Several studies have been confounded by
lack of control over two or more of these variables, most of which are widely
recognized as sociolinguistic parameters along which speech may vary (Hymes
1972; Wolfson 1976), and any one of which could be responsible for differences
observed between two corpora, operating independently from or in conjunction
with the NS/NNS difference in the interlocutor that is the supposed object of
inquiry. In other words, the variable findings and the use of non-comparable data
within and across studies may not be unrelated.
Results from a controlled laboratory study like this one must obviously also be
treated cautiously. As is so often the case, however, some loss in external validity
might be considered a small price for the more fundamentally important internal
validity, lack of which, for many researchers, would preclude generalizations
altogether. In this light, therefore, the results presented above might be interpreted as consistent with the following three hypotheses:
1 Native speakers modify not just their speech to non-native speakers, but also
various features of the interactional structure of their conversations with them.
2 Modifications of the interactional structure are greater and more consistently
observed, particularly when NS-NS and NS-NNS data are sampled from
comparable speech events.
3 Modified interaction is observed even in cases where some kinds of input
modification usually considered 'basic' (e.g. reduced syntactic complexity) are
absent.

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

Table 7: Devices used by native speakers to modify the interactional

structure ofNS-NNS conversation
Strategies (S)
(for avoiding trouble)
51
52
53
54
55

Tactics (T)
(for repairing trouble)

Relinquish topic-control
Select salient topics
Treat topics briefly
Make new topics salient
Check NNS's comprehension

Tl Accept unintentional topic-switch

T2 Request clarification
T3 Confirm own comprehension
T4 Tolerate ambiguity

Strategies and Tactics (ST)

(for avoiding and repairing trouble)
ST1 Use slow pace
ST2 Stress key words
ST3 Pause before key words

ST4 Decompose topic-comment constructions

STS Repeat own utterances
ST6 Repeat other's utterances

4.1 Strategies
SI .'Relinquish topic-control
Assuming there is no pressure upon them to do otherwise (e.g. from the nature of
the task), native speakers will often attempt to pass control of current and subsequent conversational topics to the non-native speaker. Occasionally, they do
this explicitly, as in (7):
7 NS: OK Now you know the question that's coming What have you what do
you think of the United States or the American people or whatever it is
that interests you or you noticed?
Implicit willingness to talk about whatever the non-native speaker feels comfortable with is pervasive, however, and is what often seems to lie behind the so-called
'or-choice' question (Hatch 1978), of which both (7) and (8) are examples:
8 NS: Are the islands the samedo they look same? . . as Japan as . the country
in Japan? Are the houses, for example, are the houses the same on
Osima.. as say in the country . . Sapporo or (Akairo)? Do the people talk
the same or do the houses look the same? . . . . Or are the trees the same?
As Hatch points out, or-choice questions offer the non-native speaker a series of
potential topics to talk about, often also serving to suggest possible answers to the
'questions' themselves. Of course, native speakers use or-choice questions, too
(and, at times, all the devices discussed here), when talking to other native

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planning by the native speaker. They tend to govern the way s/he conducts entire
conversations, and primarily concern what is talked about (conversational topic),
but affect how topics are treated, too. I call these conversational strategies.
Modifications motivated by the need to fix up the conversation when trouble
arises seem to be spontaneous solutions to immediate, short-term problems. They
affect primarily how topics are talked about I call these tactics for discourse
repair. A subset of the modifications of each type, strategies and tactics, is used
both to avoid and repair trouble, i.e. as both strategy and tactic, but most
modifications in this group tend to serve one or the other function more often.
Some examples of devices used as strategies and/or tactics are shown in the table
below.

MICHAEL H. LONG

133

speakers. Their use in NS-NNS conversation seems to be much more frequent,

however. One recent study of informal encounters between 36 adult native
speakers of English and 36 young Japanese adults (Long 1981b) found that in
NS-NNS conversations, of a total of 356 Yes/No questions, 75 (21 per cent)
were or-choice questions, compared with 10 (10 per cent) of 85 Yes/No questions
in a NS-NS corpus (x2 = 6.16, df = 1, p<.025).

S3: Treat topics briefly

There is a tendency in NS-NNS conversation for a large number of topics to be
treated briefly, rather than a smaller number in more detail and at greater length.
The idea seems to be to lighten the non-native speaker's conversational burden by
eliciting a simple confirmation or denial of a proposition, often by means of a
Yes/No question, and then to move on. This favors discourse built around series
of question-answer sequences rather than series of reacting moves in the form of
statements which are more common in NS-NS talk. (10) is typical of NS-NNS
conversation:
10 NS : Yeah Exactly I have not seen them
Yeah Do you live in Tokyo?
NNS : Yes
NS : Yeah?

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S2: Select salient topics

Despite their use of SI, native speakers still tend to select the majority of topics of
conversation, for the non-native speaker is often of too limited linguistic
proficiency to do anything else than follow the native speaker's lead as best s/he
can. Native speakers try to avoid introducing difficult topics by talking about the
non-native speaker him- or herself, or about whatever seems to interest him or her
whenever possible. Setting up topics of this sort means the non-native speaker has
information to convey, and so encourages his or her participation. Further, within
the range of'NNS' topics and in neutral 'third party' topics, there is a tendency on
the part of native speakers to orient towards those topics that are most salient,
physically or temporally. This can be seen in the quantity of talk about participants' immediate surroundings, the city they are in, the streets they live on,
etc., place-names being particularly favored, perhaps because they are high
frequency lexical items locally, and often among the first words which non-native
speakers learn to recognize:
9 NS : Is this tht first time that you've come to the United States?
NNS : UmNS : To Los Angeles?
The preference for salient topics also manifests itself in a tendency for NS-NNS
conversation to be more oriented to the 'now' of the 'here and now', as in caretaker-child conversation (Cross 1977). As a rough measure of this characteristic
of NS-NNS conversation, Long (1980, 1981b) compared the relative frequencies
of verbs marked temporally for present and non-present in NS-NS and NS-NNS
conversations. The 'now' orientation was statistically significantly higher in the
NS-NNS conversations in the 1980 study, as has already been reported in Table
3 of this paper. In the 1981b study, the data showed the same trend, but the difference was just short of significant at the .05 level (%2 = 3.33, when a %2 value of
3.84 is required with df = 1).

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

S4: Make new topics salient

Native speakers do a lot of work to make new conversational topics salient for the
non-native speaker. They employ several devices to achieve this purpose. First,
frames, such as OK, So, Well, and Now, uttered with a high-fall intonation
contour and preceded and followed by a pause, serve to mark closure of old topics
and introduction of new ones:
11 NS : uh the baby with the two hairs has a very big ball in my picture
NNS : He is ve-uh it's small
NS : OK And then next to the baby and the ball is a small very small little
dog
While frequent, however, frames do not appear to be more common in NS-NNS
than in NSNS conversation, as reported earlier (Table 6). The conflicting finding
by Scarcella and Higa (1982) is probably due to the fact that the non-native
speakers in that study were children and adolescents, and the native speaker
controls adults, i.e. there was an adaptation to age rather than linguistic ability of
the interlocutor.
Saliency is also achieved by moving topics to the front or end of utterances, as
in (11) and, via left-dislocation, in (12):
12 NS : Sunny? Is that a woman or a man?
Burying them in the middle of utterances does not work so well:
13 NS : Yes And how how do you how do you like Los Angeles so far?
NNS : U m . . . pardon?
NS : Do you like Los Angeles?
NNS : Yes

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NNS I come from (Ngunga) Tokyo near- near Tokyo

NS
Aha
NNS But I live in Tokyo
NS
Aha Do you study?
NS
Or
NNS No
NS
do you work
The native speaker closes down the previous topic and introduces two more
(where the non-native speaker is from and what she does there) in the space of
eight very short turns containing only two topic-continuing moves in T-units (both
produced by the non-native speaker).
Two studies have provided data suggesting that brief treatment of topics is
common in NS-NNS conversation. Arthur et al. (1980) had native speaker and
non-native speaker telephone callers ask identical questions of airline reservation
staff concerning the nature of particular kinds of commercial aircraft. Non-native
callers consistently elicited fewer information bits than did native speakers. Long
(1981b) compared the number of topic-continuing moves in NS-NS and
NS-NNS conversation elicited by 50 sequential topic-initiating moves in each
corpus, the NS-NNS data again involving the 36 American-Japanese dyads in
informal face-to-face conversation. For 50 topic-initiating moves, there were 606
topic-continuations with a native speaker interlocutor, but only 211 with nonnative speakers (t = 5.768, df = 98, p<.0005).

MICHAEL H. LONG

135

Using a slow pace (ST1), and especially stressing key words (ST2) and pausing
for half a beat or a beat before or after them (ST3) also boost saliency:
14 NS : How long have you been at UCLA?
15 NS : Aha What year are you?. What year in college are you in?
The last three devices are also used, and more frequently so, as tactics, however
(as indicated by 'ST).
Perhaps the most noticeable effort to make topics salient is the use of questions
to encode topic-nominating moves, as in (7), (8), (10) and (16):
16 NS : So you g- are you going to con- continue at UCLA? Or are you going
to change schools?

17 NS

: Do you feel that- s- so- some people say that Los Angeles is a daytime city
NNS : Yeah
NS : and San Francisco is a night-time city?, (mean) Los Angeles people
do things that have to do with the oh with the beach and with the
sunshine . and in in San Francisco people tend to go out at night to uh
to oh you know the the jazz places or or out to dinner or whatever .
N' they also say that San Francisco's more spp/i/sticated than Los
Angeles . Did you find that? . . People dress up more in San
Francisco?
NNS : Yeah
NS : Yeah . . . How long will you be here?

In (17), the native speaker's series of structuring and reacting moves, mostly in the
form of statements, with pauses at what Sachs, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974)
call 'transition-relevance points', fails to bring the non-native speaker into the conversation. Her two uses of Yeah in fact sound on the tape like polite backchanneling noises rather than expressions of agreement or understanding.
Compare this excerpt with the successful sequence of quick-fire questions in (10).
One final device used to make new topics salient is what I call 'decomposition'.
This serves both as a strategy and a tactic (ST4), more often the latter. It is,
however, used to avoid trouble, especially by native speakers with considerable
prior foreigner talk experience. Consider examples (18) and (19), which illustrate,
respectively, the use of decomposition as strategy and tactic.

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The self-correction, 'So you g-', in (16) seems to be motivated by the wish to
include an extra question marker, subject-auxiliary inversion. A previous study
(Long 1981b) found a remarkable 96 per cent of 50 topic-initiating moves
examined were encoded as questions in NS-NNS conversation, as compared to
62 per cent of 50 such moves in NS-NS conversation (x2 = 17.54, df = 1,
p<.0005). The preference for questions probably has several motivations, some of
which concern the relatively simpler responding tasks they set non-native speakers
(see Long 1981b for discussion). In terms of saliency, however, the linguistic
markers associated with the interrogative form (subject-auxiliary inversion, Wh
morphology, rising intonation, or combinations of these) may help the native
speaker to signal and the non-native speaker to recognize an approaching
speaking turn for the non-native speaker. Turn-allocation devices more common
in NS-NS conversation certainly do not seem to work so well:

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

18 NS

Uh what does uh what does your father do in uh you're from Kyoto,

right?
Yeah
Yeah What does your father do in Kyoto?

NNS
NS
19 NS

5 5 : Check non-native speaker's comprehension

Comprehension checks, such as Right?, OK? and Do you understand?, clearly
show an effort on the part of native speakers to anticipate and prevent a breakdown in communication. They are used significantly more frequently with nonnative speakers than in NS-NS conversation, as was reported earlier (Table 6).
4.2 Tactics
Tl:Accept unintentional topic-switch
When native speakers fail to establish a new topic, and a communication breakdown ensues, they will sometimes drop the topic altogether. One example of this is
the tactic of accepting an unintentional topic-switch by the non-native speaker, as
in (20):
20 NS : Are you going to visit San Franscisco? Or Las Vegas?
NNS : Yes I went to Disneyland and to Knottsberry Farm
NS : Oh yeah?
The non-native speaker misunderstands the question as one concerning her
previous sightseeing visits, and the native speaker repairs the discourse by treating
the inappropriate response as a topic-nomination. I have no quantified data for
T l , and it does not seem to occur very frequently. It is clearly related to SI
(relinquish topic-control) and T4 (tolerate ambiguity), and again seems impressionistically to be used more frequently by native speakers with considerable prior
foreigner talk experience. Compare its success in (20) with the failure, in (21), of
an inexperienced native speaker, who persisted with the original topic without ever
getting a real response to his question:

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When do you go to the uh Santa Monica? . . . You say you go fishing

in Santa Monica, right?
NNS Yeah
NS
When?
In exchanges of this type, the native speaker wishes to ask the non-native speaker
to comment on a new topic. In (18), where decomposition is operating as a
strategy, the native speaker checks himself, self-correcting after 'what does your
father do in', and first establishes the new topic by stating it in isolation from the
request for commentary. As here, and also in (19), this is often done with rising
intonation, and often with a tag (right?), asking for confirmation that the topic has
been established (cf. the 'try-marking' intonation noted in Sachs and Schegloff,
1974). Then, when the requested confirmation is given, the comment, in the form
of a question about the new topic, is stated or, when decomposition serves as a
tactic, as in (19), restated. Decomposition is clearly a more complex device,
whether used as a strategy or as a tactic, than others we have discussed. It has not
occurred as frequently as others in data analysed so far, and seems to be confined
to non-native speakers with considerable prior foreigner talk experience when it
does occur (Long, in press).

MICHAEL H. LONG

137

21 NS

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: Um . . . how long do you think or how long do you want to wait to be

able to speak and read so you can go to college? Whattwo years?
One year?
NNS : One year?
NS : One year? Do you think in one year that you can learn to speak and
read well enough to go to college? . . . Do you understand what I'm
what I'm what I'm I'm going for?
NNS : College?
72: Request clarification
Clarification requests are defined as any expression by a native speaker designed
to elicit clarification of the interlocutor's preceding utterance(s). They are mostly
formed by questions, but unlike confirmation checks, may consist of Wh or
Yes/No questions as well as uninverted (intonation) and tag questions, for they
require that the interlocutor either furnish new information or recode information
previously given. Unlike confirmation checks, in other words, there is no
presupposition on the speaker's part that s/he has understood or heard the other's
previous utterance(s). While questions are the most frequent form of clarification
request, they are also effected by statements like / don't follow, and imperatives
like Try again. Long (1980) found clarification checks were used statistically
significantly more often in NS-NNS than in NS-NS conversation, as shown
earlier (Table 6).
T3: Confirm own comprehension
Confirmation checks are defined as any expressions by the native speaker
immediately following an utterance by the interlocutor which are designed to elicit
confirmation that the utterance has been correctly heard or understood by the
speaker. Thus, The man? following Next to the man by the other speaker is a
confirmation check. Confirmation checks are always formed by rising intonation
questions, with or without a tag (The man? or The man, right?). They always
involve repetition of all or part of the other's preceding utterance. They are
answerable by a simple confirmation (Yes, Mmhm) in the event that the preceding
utterance was correctly heard or understood, and require no new information
from the interlocutor. Long (1980) found confirmation checks to be more frequent in the NS-NNS than in the NS-NS corpus (see Table 6).
T4: Tolerate ambiguity
Another tactic used by native speakers to sustain conversation is to tolerate
ambiguous utterances by the non-native speaker. The non-native's difficulties with
the SL pronunciation may make items impossible to hear clearly, and even
correctly pronounced items may be semantically anomalous, or inappropriate.
Acceptance of an unintentional topic-switch is an extreme example of this, but
many other semantic miscues or non sequiturs are all allowed to pass which do
not result in changes of topic. These often take the form of unsatisfactory replies
to questions, as in (22):
22 NNS Turkey I like
NS
Really? Where did you eat turkey?. Where do you eat (the) turkey?
NNS . . . Uhm in (university restaurant)
NS
Here?
NNS Yes sandwich
NS
(.h) Turkey sandwiches, yeah

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

While impressionistically pervasive in NS-NNS conversation, T4 is difficult, if

not impossible to quantify, for ambiguity clearly exists in all conversation, and
varies in degree according, among other factors, to the amount of common knowledge shared by speakers. There are some clear cases, that is, but a lot of borderline ones, too.

ST5: Repeat own utterances

Self-repetitions are pervasive in NS-NNS conversation, and are used significantly
more often than when the interlocutor is another native speaker (Table 6). As
defined in that study (Long 1980), they include partial or complete, and exact or
semantic repetition (i.e. paraphrase) of any of the speaker's utterances which
occurred within five conversational turns (by both speakers) of the turn containing the repetition. Distinguishing repetitions and paraphrases may prove important for predicting certain aspects of SLA, but I know of no study to date which
has done so and quantified its data.
ST6: Repeat other's utterances
Other-repetitions in Long (1980) were defined in the same way as self-repetitions,
except for the obvious difference concerning which speaker's utterances were
involved. Again, as reported in Table 6, other-repetitions were statistically
significantly more frequent in the NS-NNS than in the NS-NS corpus.
4.4 Summary
The fifteen devices described above, five strategies, four tactics, and six that serve
as both, are some of the interactional resources open to native speakers in conversation with non-native speakers. Their use goes some way to making linguistic
input comprehensible to the SL acquirer, as evidenced by the fact that without
them communication, conversation, breaks down; with their use conversation is
possible and is sustained. Non-native speakers understand and so can take part
appropriately.
No claim is made, however, that these fifteen devices are anything like an
exhaustive list of the options available to native speakers. Some may also be
language- or culture-specific, and more frequent in the particular kinds of
NS-NNS conversations that provided data for the studies from which they were
derived. These are issues which can only be resolved by further empirical work.
CONCLUSION

It is widely assumed, and probably rightly, that samples of a SL heard but not
understood by a would-be acquirer of that language serve no useful purpose in the
SLA process. Only comprehensible input will do. The question is, how does that
input become comprehensible to the learner? Modifications of the input itself
almost certainly help. They are not, however, very consistendy observed in studies

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4.3 Strategies and tactics

ST1-ST4 have already been dealt with in the role they play as strategies. They
function in the same way as tactics, but then follow a breakdown in communication indicated by inappropriate silence, an inappropriate or incomprehensible
utterance, or an appeal for assistance on the part of the NNS (one or more of
which must occur immediately preceding any native speaker utterance which is to
be classified as a tactic).

MICHAEL H. LONG

139

NOTES
1
This is a slightly amended version of a paper appearing (in German translation) in a special
issue on second language acquisition of Zeitschrift Jur Literaturwissenschafl und Linguistik, Vol.
45, 1981. The author gratefully acknowledges the publishers of LiLi and the editors of Vol. 45,
W. Klein and i. Weissenborn, for permission to produce the English version.
2
As used throughout this paper, the terms 'native speaker' (NS) and 'non-native speaker' (NNS)
refer to speakers for whom the language of communication is/is not their mother tongue. In other
words, as used here, and also in the studies to be reported upon, the native/non-native distinction is
an absolute one. However, many of the linguistic and conversational resources attributed to NSs
addressing non-natives are undoubtedly available to other classes of speakers, too. Thus, some of
the NS speech modifications to be described are also well-attested characteristics of caretaker
speech and of speech to the mentally retarded. They may also turn out to appear in language
addressed to native speakers of a non-standard variety of that language, or, indeed, in language
addressed to any listener (perceived as) less in control of the variety of language being used, whether
or not he or she is a NS. If the ability to adapt linguistic performance to an interlocutor is a universal (non-language-specific) part of linguistic competence, non-native speakers should also be able
to modify their interlanguage when using it to address other NNSs who are of lower proficiency.
Some or all of the linguistic and conversational resources, that is, may well be available to speakers
when differences between their own and their interlocutors' abilities are not absolute, but relative.
1
The example of modified input given in (4) involves deletion of did, and hence, ungrammatical
speech. 'Modified' should not be equated with 'ungrammatical', however. Most modifications do not
result in ungrammatically, taking the form of, e.g. lower syntactic complexity in a corpus of speech
addressed to NNSs compared with that in a corpus of NS-NS talk. Modification within the bounds
of grammaticality is measured in terms of statistically significant differences in the relative frequencies of some linguistic features), e.g. S-nodes per T-unit, between the two corpora.
4
The research reported here was part of a larger study conducted for the author's PhD dissertation at UCLA (Long 1980). For their constructive criticism and support throughout, I would like to
acknowledge the debt I owe the members of my committee: Professors Roger Andersen, Russell
Campbell, Susan Curtiss, Gerry Mahoney, John Schumann, and Noreen Webb, and especially to its
chairperson, Evelyn Hatch. None has seen this paper, however, or is responsible for any errors of
fact or interpretation it may contain.
5
The unusually high alpha level of .005 was used in order to minimize the likelihood of chance
findings of significance when so many variables and hypotheses (30 in the full study) were examined
on the same data set This procedure, of course, also increases the likelihood of a type-2 error, i.e. of
not finding significant differences when differences in fact obtain.

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that seek them, and they are certainly not the only means. Modifications in the
interactional structure of conversation are greater, more consistently found, and
probably more important. They even seem to occur when linguistic input is nonsignificantly different in most respects from that in NS-NS conversation.
The modifications of interaction that native speakers make are quite numerous,
diverse, and apparently prone to vary with certain characteristics of the speaker,
such as his or her prior foreigner talk experience. Certain patterns in their use can
be observed, however. Some, such as selecting salient topics and treating them
briefly, appear to be used only as strategies, to avoid conversational trouble.
Others, such as acceptance of unintentional topic-switches and clarification
requests, serve as tactics, to repair the discourse when trouble occurs. Further
research is needed to establish the validity of this preliminary classification, and
then to test how variation in the extent and nature of linguistic input to the learner,
and in the conversational style which succeeds or fails in making it comprehensible, affect the course, rate, and ultimate attainment of the SLA process.
(Received May 1982)

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NATIVE SPEAKER/NON-NATIVE SPEAKER CONVERSATION

' A T-unit (Hunt 1970) is defined as 'a main clause plus all subordinate clauses and nonclausal
structures attached to or embedded in it'.
1
Type-token ratio, a measure of lexical diversity, was calculated by dividing the total number of
different words (types) by the total number of words (tokens).

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