The editing talk of adult ESL learners

Abstract

Passage‐editing tasks are often assigned to students in second/foreign language classes, yet there seems to be very little research investigating whether such tasks are suitable for focusing learners’ attention on the grammatical structures targeted by the teacher nor on how such learners make grammatical decisions. The study reported here investigates the talk of 14 intermediate learners of ESL in a tertiary setting as they performed a passage‐editing task collaboratively — in pairs or triads. The data, transcripts of the students’ dialogues, were analysed for the kind of talk the task elicited, the grammatical items which drew the most attention from the learners, and the knowledge sources the learners used in making or defending their grammatical decisions. The analysis reveals that a passage‐editing task is an appropriate pedagogic task which draws learner attention to language choices, although it may not necessarily draw attention to the language items targeted by the teacher. Furthermore, the study shows that intermediate adult learners often rely on their intuition in making grammatical decisions but that they tend to reach more accurate decisions when they rely on a range of knowledge sources at their disposal.

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