Topic Effects on Interlanguage Production

The present study examines the topic effects on oral production by L2 learners. A total of 29 six grade elementary school students’ oral production on three different topics was examined for the study. The familiar topics such as introducing self and others elicited significantly fluent oral production, while the non-familiar topic did not. It is also found that L2 learners employed unique syntactic structures with the topics of introducing self and others such as multiple subject constructions and early relative clauses, whereas such syntactic structures were not observed with the non-familiar topic. Thus, a selection of topics must be conducted carefully in research on L2 production.