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The observation has been made that speech in contacts between native and non-native speakers may be modified and simplified to the point of ungrammaticality (the me Tarzan, you Jane phenomenon). Since the early 1980s, a number of studies in Second Language Acquisition have carried the notion of modification into the analysis of the interaction itself. The goal was to learn about interactional modifications and about how they relate to processes of language acquisition. In these analyses, a number of concepts from Conversation Analysis (CA) have been applied. This paper discusses a number of methodological problems in this research, of which especially the model of communication assumed and the type of data analyzed are the most prominent. Finally the paper discussed problems related to the introduction of core CA concepts into research on native-nonnative speaker communication.