Muutused eesti keele õppijate ja emakeelekõnelejate interaktsioonis ühe aasta jooksul
Changes in the interactions between learners of Estonian and native speakers over one year

Summary/Abstract: This article is the second part of a longitudinal study of the oral interactions of learners of Estonian as a second language (L2) and native speakers (L1). The informants in the research are five adult language learners (native languages English, Romanian, Udmurt and Russian), who studied Estonian in an intensive course and who did not know Estonian prior to the beginning of their studies. As partners of the language learners three speakers of Estonian as a native language participated in the research; all of them had prior experience in teaching Estonian as a second language but none of them had taught the informants. During the year the research was conducted, four free-form conversations with native speakers were recorded with four of the language learners and two with one of them; the average length of the conversations was 20 minutes and the average interval between the conversations was two months. The article examines the particularities of the L1 and L2 learners’ interactions and changes over the period of the year as the Estonian language competence of the learners continues to grow. The effect of the development of the learners’ Estonian language competence on the interactions is most clearly seen in the existence of negotiations of meaning and the strategies used to resolve them. If in the first recordings most of the meaning negotiations occur in situations where the learner did not understand their Estonian conversation partner. The material of subsequent conversations includes a large number of examples where the L1 speaker did not understand the language learner’s sentence in Estonian and required additional explanations. The reason behind such a change could be the learners’ wish to use their amplified Estonian language resources, and certainly also their increased confidence in communicating in Estonian. Also expanded are the learners’ strategies in obtaining help. Now, alongside signalling difficulties in understanding or expression by means of pauses or pause fillers there are help-seeking questions articulated either in Estonian or in combination with another language shared by the conversation partners. Relying upon other common languages during the Estonian-language conversation is a strategy shared by all of the informants from the first to the last recording; if they lack vocabulary in Estonian, the learners say the requisite word in another language and ask their conversation partner to translate it into Estonian. When expressing themselves in Estonian, the learners signal their insecurity and need for help by using interrogatory intonation and leaving words they have begun incomplete; in such a case the Estonian conversation partners complete the learners’ utterances. A common feature of the participant L1 speakers’ behaviour in conversations is offering corrective feedback to the linguistic inaccuracies in the text, even in those sections of the interaction where the learner does not express a need for help and there are no problems with understanding; for correction, the strategy of correct rearticulation of the learner’s utterance is used. Since all the native speakers of Estonian have language teaching background, it is possible that they brought elements of language teaching into the conversations to offer their partners opportunities to develop linguistic accuracy. The learners take up linguistic support provided by the L1 speakers by repeating the linguistic unit.Over the course of a year, one could also notice the occurrence of individual variation in the acquisition and use of Estonian among the language learning informants, and these influenced both the structure of the conversations and the conversation strategies of the participants in the interaction.

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