Background to the research Language education remains an active area of research, and inquiry on a global level, and numerous studies conducted by language educators are sensitive to many issues faced by learners, communities, and national education systems concerning language learning and education. It is believed that conversational interaction can facilitate inter-language development, but compared to laboratory settings realistic research to identify its efficacy in classroom settings is few. The interaction hypothesis, within the context of second language acquisition (SLA), suggests that receiving comprehensible input and interactional feedback and negotiating for meaning are helpful for second language (L2) learning. Literature on conversational interaction studies reveal that much of the empirical research has been carried out in laboratory settings, hence some researchers opine that patterns may differ if the research is done in L2 classroom settings The research by Gass et al (2005) is an attempt to compare interaction in classrooms and laboratories to provide insight into the nature of interactions in each setting. It is assumed that interaction, when it involves negotiations for meaning and feedback, facilitates second language learning (SLA), which includes receiving comprehensible input and interactional feedback, and may provide opportunities for learners to test target language to identify the difference between their “interlanguage and target language” (Gass, 2005, p. 576). According to Pica (1994a), negotiation for meaning is an activity ‘in which learners seek clarification, confirmation, and repetition of L2 utterances they do not understand” (cited by Gass). The important benefit of interaction is its capacity for negotiation to connect input and output. Research paradigm Earlier research by Long (1981, 1983, 1985), Pica (1985, 1988, 1989, 1992), and others, in the domain of interaction research, was mainly investigations of various aspects of the role of negotiation in comprehensions, which advanced to interaction-comprehension links. Recent empirical studies by Ayoun (2001), Braidi (2002), Long et al (1998), and Philp (2003), to name a few, convincingly demonstrated a relationship between various types of interaction and L2 learning. These claims that there are benefits from conversational interaction by a number of researchers are supported with empirical data collected in laboratory settings. The research findings of Foster (1998), on the basis of classroom observation, prompts her that “learners appear to choose not to negotiate for meaning,” because the classroom environment is less controlled than that in the laboratory. In her data, dyads carrying out information exchange tasks were the most successful in producing negotiation for meaning, suggesting that it may be worthwhile to investigate task type further. In the opinion of Nicholas et al (2001, p.721 as cited by Gass) in many English as the second language (ESL) classrooms “response to learner utterances are even more likely to be interpreted as reactions to meaning.” Thus, the relevance of laboratory research to L2 classroom settings is important in interaction research, and the study by Gass is “a first step toward inves