Spanish Linguistics Commons^™

Exploring Turn At Talk In Spanish: Native And Nonnative Speaker Interactions, Andrew Lynch

Andrew Lynch

This preliminary study highlights the demonstrated gains in conversational competence of three Spanish L2 learners who participated in a 10-week university immersion program. The analyses considered turn-taking and discourse structure, comparing the learners’ task-based conversational interactions in L2 Spanish with separate interactions in their L1 English and the interactions of a group of Spanish native speakers. Although the findings suggest that during the immersion experience the learners made gains in L2 conversational competence with respect to pausing and turn length, their development of turn-taking organization and discourse structure reflected an approximation to their own L1 behavioral norms rather than those …