Questions in Foreigner Talk Discourse

A study was undertaken to investigate relationships among linguistic input, conversational interaction, and second language acquisition. Tapes and transcripts of eight informal conversations among native speakers of English and 36 conversations between native speakers and students of English as a second language were compared. Differences were found between the two corpora in (1) their discourse structure, and (2) the relative frequencies of certain syntactic and morphological constructions. Relationships existed between the discourse structures and the relative frequencies, and between the relative frequencies and the order in which second language acquirers produce the constructions accurately in obligatory contexts.