The present study does offer evidence for the claim (Long, 1981; Pica et al., 1987) that negotiated interaction can facilitate comprehension. However, this is tempered by the evidence which supports Chaudron's claim (1982) that teachers' elaborations can confuse learners and impede comprehension. Both of these findings were evidenced in the individual tasks (i.e., when the teacher was working one-on-one with students); however, neither occurred to a significant degree in the group setting.

An important finding of the present study offers confirming evidence for the claim (Pica, 1991a; Slimani, 1989) that classroom interaction can facilitate comprehension for those learners who are exposed to the interaction as well as those learners who actually engage in the interaction. Furthermore, the analysis of data in Task 2B (Chapter 4) reveals that, for one particular learner (S7), learning can be a "spectator sport" (Allwright's term, 1984b, p. 11).

The high level of comprehension achieved by the learners in Round 2 of the study, when the teacher offered unsolicited feedback to the learners, suggests that this type of input may be more appropriate for younger learners (a contention put forth by Scarcella & Higa, [1981]). However, it appears that this improved comprehension is not directly related to acquisition. In fact, of the four items that were not comprehended in Task 2A, two were acquired receptively by those subjects who failed to demonstrate comprehension and two were not acquired. This calls into question the notion that input should be made comprehensible through simplification and redundancy, even for very young learners. This may be the case for comprehension; however, it could be just as easily argued that it is the learners' struggle to understand that may be the key to promoting learning. This contention was put forth by White (1987) concerning development of L2 grammar. Perhaps a similar case could be made for the acquisition of vocabulary.

Finally, the present study offers a solid operationalization of the construct of student-initiated negotiated interaction by adapting a model first put forth by Varonis and Gass (1985b). Analyzing classroom interaction with the model presented in Figure 7 (Chapter 3) enables the researcher to quantify learners' efforts to make new linguistic information comprehensible through interaction with their interlocutors. It should be the goal of research in the field to provide the necessary empirical evidence to fully explain the processes involved in SLA through continued investigation employing this and other techniques.