... aspects of teacher talk: (a) speech rate, (b) the number and duration of pauses, (c) frequency of tensed verbs and number of S nodes (= clauses) and T units (= a principal clause plus all related ... began approximately in the early-mid 1980s. They evolved inspired by various findings from (1 ) "caretaker speech" studies in first language development (Snow, 1972) and (2 ) "foreigner ... and extra-linguistic information. The input itself can be divided into finely- and roughly-tuned. The finely-tuned input is targeted at the learners' present level of acquisition, aiming...