From observed lessons and subsequent interviews and elicitation procedures, 18 experienced teachers of ESL to adults and children in an Australian context described their classroom practices and explained these in relation to the underlying language teaching principles that they say as guiding their work. The purpose of the study was to discover the meanings the teachers gave to their classroom work in terms of the particular relationships they identified between practice and principle. Despite being undertaken within a particular teaching situation, the study revealed both individual and group diversity in the practices they adopted and in their underlying principles. In addition, a practice widely adopted across the group appeared to be based upon diverse principles, just as a single principle that was commonly shared among the teachers was associated by them with a wide range of practices. Closer examination of the whole group data, however, revealed a particular pattern in the links that the teachers made between principles and practices. The complex relationships uncovered in the study between thinking and action in the work of experienced language teachers have implications for curriculum innovation, teacher education, and for language classroom research.

This paper reports on a study that examines the pattern of interaction in child native speaker (NS)–nonnative speaker (NNS) conversation to determine if the NSs provide negative feedback to their NNS conversational partners. It appears that just as children are able to modify their input for their less linguistically proficient conversational partners in first language acquisition (Snow, 1977), so too are children able to modify their interactions for NNS peers in the second language acquisition process and, in doing so, provide negative feedback. Two forms of NS modification were identified in this study as providing reactive and implicit negative feedback to the NNS. These were (a) negotiation strategies, including repetition, clarification requests, and comprehension checks, and (b) recasts. The results indicated that NSs respond differentially to the grammaticality and ambiguity of their NNS peers' conversational contributions. Furthermore, NS responses (negotiate, recast, or ignore) appeared to be triggered by the type and complexity of NNS errors, although it was more likely overall that negative feedback would be used rather than the error ignored. Additionally, evidence suggested that negative feedback was incorporated by the NNSs into their interlanguage systems. This indicates that not only does negative evidence exist for child second language learners in these types of conversations, but that it is also usable and used by them in the language acquisition process.