Chapter published in:
Expanding Individual Difference Research in the Interaction Approach: Investigating learners, instructors, and other interlocutors
Edited by Laura Gurzynski-Weiss
[AILA Applied Linguistics Series 16] 2017
► pp. 152–172

Instructor individual characteristics and L2 interaction

| Indiana University
This chapter opens the second section of the volume, which focuses on second and foreign language (L2) instructors. After defining the research domain of instructor individual characteristics, the chapter provides an overview of the role(s) of the instructor situated within the interaction approach (Gass & Mackey, 2015). It then examines how instructor individual characteristics may influence the L2 interaction-based learning opportunities instructors provide to learners, focusing on those most relevant for the framework- namely, comprehensible input, usable feedback and negotiation for meaning, opportunities to interact within meaning-based and appropriately complex tasks and task sequences, and opportunities to produce output, including modified output. Alongside this theoretical discussion, the chapter provides a critical and state-of-the-art review of studies that have examined instructor characteristics within this framework and demonstrates how instructor individual characteristics play an important role in L2 interaction-based learning opportunities. It concludes with considerations of how instructor individual characteristics undoubtedly interact with learner individual differences and contextual factors and outlines promising areas for future research on instructor individual characteristics within and beyond the interaction approach.
Keywords: instructor individual characteristics, language instructors, L2 interaction
Published online: 12 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/aals.16.07gur
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Gurzynski-Weiss, Laura
2020.  In Cross-theoretical Explorations of Interlocutors and their Individual Differences [Language Learning & Language Teaching, 53], ► pp. 4 ff. Crossref logo

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