What the Other Half Gives: the Interlocutor’s Role in Non-native Speaker Performance
Stephanie Lindemann · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2006
Research on non-native speaker performance in the target language has, unsurprisingly, tended to focus on the non-native alone. Such a focus seems especially logical if we are investigating a speaker’s basic language skills such as pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar, which are relatively easy to assess in a rather artificial situation in which both the material to be tested and the amount of natural interaction are limited. Likewise, the behaviour of the ‘interlocutor’ is of lesser importance when we consider non-native writing, although it is not completely irrelevant, as for example Donald Rubin and Melanie Williams-James (1997) have shown that mainstream teachers’ beliefs about writers’ nationalities may influence their evaluation of the writing.