ABSTRACT
The foundations of the interaction approach were laid during the early 1980s and rapidly burgeoned into an increasingly coherent research program led by Susan Gass along with other key contributors (see reviews in Gass, 2003; Gass & Mackey, 2006). The approach has been sustained for about three decades now and has demonstrated that through interactions with others, learners of an additional language (L2) avail themselves of linguistic data under conditions that have been shown to have competenceexpanding potential (Gass, 1997). The initial research was guided by the goals of describing interactional modifications and gauging the benefits they entail for comprehension. A seminal study by Gass and Varonis (1994) inspected, for the first time, the linguistic benefits of interaction on subsequent L2 production. This study marked the prelude towards a second generation of efforts that has concentrated on demonstrating that interaction “focuses a learner’s attention on linguistic form, on ways of creating discourse” (Gass & Varonis, 1994, p. 298). Since then, studies have embraced attention to form as a central explanatory construct (Gass, 1991, 2003) and have also probed the L2 learning outcomes of interaction (Keck, Iberri-Shea, Tracy-Ventura, & Wa-Mbaleka, 2006; Mackey & Goo, 2007).
