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Child peer interaction in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings has recently received increasing attention with respect to age, instruction type and first language (L1) use, but longitudinal studies remain scarce and the effects of proficiency pairing and language choice on meaning negotiation strategies are still rather unexplored. Within a primary school EFL context, this paper aims to explore the amount and types of meaning negotiation, and the effects of time, proficiency pairing and language choice in a spot-the-differences task. Forty Catalan/Spanish bilingual children were paired into mixed and matched proficiency dyads, and their oral production was analyzed twice over the course of two years (i.e., 9-10 and 11-12 years old). The analysis included conversational adjustments, self- and other-repetition and positive and negative feedback in the learners’ L1 and second language (L2). Our data show that the amount of meaning negotiation is low, although L2 meaning negotiation is higher than L1 meaning negotiation, and all the strategies are present in the data except for comprehension checks. Time effects are hardly observed. However, proficiency pairing and language effects are more generally found, whereby mixed proficiency dyads tend to negotiate for meaning more than matched dyads and meaning negotiation instances are more frequent in the L2 than in the L1.

This paper explores coalitions between tense-aspect morphology and the aspectual class of predicates in second language acquisition (the Aspect Hypothesis) on the basis of 36 oral narratives elicited with a picture book from French L1 adult learners of English. The observed distributional patterns are analysed in relation to the prototypical inflection/predicate coalitions observed both at early stages of L2 development and in English L1. While advanced learners are expected to make a productive use of tense-aspect morphology within all predicate classes, our data indicate that the prototypical coalition between the progressive form and activity predicates remains strong until very proficient stages of English L2, when the distribution of verb morphology within this class eventually becomes more flexible and activities as a class are predominantly encoded in the non-progressive present or past form. Non-grammaticalisation of the progressive in the learners' L1 may interfere with the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis for this form in English L2.

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