The contribution of the listener to verbal interaction in Spanish Foreign Language. A comparative study

The knowledge of the factors that can promote the acquisition of communicative competence in a second language is an issue of great relevance to researchers due to the theoretical and didactic consequences involved. However, far too little attention has been paid to the role of the listener in oral communication in Spanish foreign language (SFL). So the aim of this study is to analyze the contributions of the listener in the development of communicative competence in SFL. The first specific objective of this study is to describe the participation of the listener responses emitted by the listener in the verbal interaction in SFL. The second is to explore the impact that language proficiency in the target language production, has on listener responses. To achieve these objectives, from the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis, an inductive methodology based on the elaboration of an oral corpus of 30 dyadic Spanish conversations in Taiwanese SFL learners of two different linguistic levels of SFL, has been adopted. The results indicate that listener responses in conversations are essential components that contribute to improve the oral interaction in SFL, and show that language proficiency is a relevant factor in the contributions made by the listener. Conversations become more fluent and spontaneous through more active and participatory listening from the higher level students, who used quantitatively and qualitatively different listener responses.