The reaction of the target language speaker to the L2 learner's errors may play an important role in developing awareness of norms of correctness. Corrective feedback functions in different ways to guide the learner towards preferred performance. Based on the corrective portions of classroom interaction in French immersion classes, a model for this kind of discourse has been developed. Different types and features of correcting acts combine into a structural model that can describe actual corrective interactions for a given error or set of errors. Use of the model in description helps isolate ambiguities; it highlights special features of corrective interaction that are likely to be more effective in eliciting correct performance. The example of various types of “repetitions”, or “response modeling”, is taken to show which types appear to lead to more successful correction. The model may be of use to both teachers and students in learning to identify corrective techniques and to be sensitive to the function of various kinds of feedback.

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This important new book provides a critical overview of recent classroom-centered research and its implications for the teaching and learning of languages. Chaudron synthesizes and evaluates crucial research about the way student and teacher behaviours affect language learning and discusses research methods. Second Language Classrooms will be of vital interest to researchers, language teachers, and curriculum specialists, as well as readers with a general interest in education, linguistics, sociology, or psychology.

An experiment was designed to investigate how different types of topic reinstatements affected second language learners' recognition and recall of sentence topics in lectures. The variant reinstatement structures tested were repetition of the noun topic, rhetorical questions, synonyms, conditional clauses, and simple noun reiteration. The research question was whether syntactic simplicity or elaboration and redundancy would be more effective in promoting retention of the topic. Findings indicated that the redundant repeated noun was significantly better recognized than the simple noun, and was better recalled than the conditional or synonym. Learners with relatively low English proficiency tended to have poorer recall ability on the syntactically more complex structures.

Models of the second language acquisition process have not specifically elaborated on the nature of the learner's perception and processing of target language input, a process known as intake. They have typically failed to specify the mechanisms or variables involved in the intake process or to distinguish between the stages of processing input from perception, to comprehension, to assimilation into an interlanguage grammar. Research and theoretical models from L1 psycholinguistic literature have been neglected. Recent L1 and L2 research on language processing are compared, and experimental methods for eliciting data to confirm them are discussed.