A Discourse Domain Approach to Interlanguage Variation: Its influence on Korean EFL learners' conversational behavior

Abstract

Interlanguage studies in SLA have dealt with its attributes in systematicity and variability. This study targeted on interlanguage variation based upon the Discourse Domain Model (Selinker & Douglas 1985) and examined its effects on learners' conversational behavior. The results showed that discourse-domain speakers revealed active participation producing greater number of words/t-units. The structures were also grammatically more complex and coherent with greater subordinate clauses per t-unit. The overall speech rate had accelerated in these fields. Even the intermediate students displayed greater L2 performance on their discourse-domains. However, higher L2 proficiency seemed to compensate for the lack of content-knowledge and did not greatly influence the advanced learners. Discourse domain speakers had sufficient content-knowledge and greater interest which enabled them to make elaborations with specific descriptions. However, neutral-domain speakers showed contrastively different behaviors with uncertainty, employing hedges and code-switching strategies.