The Links between the Linguistic Designs of L2 Teacher Questions and the Student Responses They Engender

A great deal of research undertaken in child language development, neurolinguistics and various branches of functional and cognitive linguistics has shown that a main source of language development is the spoken input to which learners are exposed. Despite the fact that for most adult L2 learners, the greatest exposure to the L2 is the input they experience in the classroom, we still know very little of the linguistic quality of L2 classroom input and its links to L2 development. The study reported in this paper is a partial response to this gap. Drawing on research from L1 classrooms linking the linguistic quality of teacher questions to the linguistic quality of student responses and grounded in the shared theoretical and methodological framework of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, our study examines the linguistic designs of L2 teacher questions and the links between them and the L2 student responses they engender.