Negotiated Interaction And Learner Production: Investigation Of High School EFL Classroom

The research on negotiation has been a hot point in the field of SLA in the recent two decades. There is a widely acknowledged point that negotiation would provide the learners with more comprehensible input, raise their consciousness in language forms and provide more opportunities to produce output to test the hypotheses of their interlanguage. What's more, negotiation also can be justified by social interactionalism, which holds that learners construct their knowledge during the interaction with others or with the environment. Since 1980s, classroom second language acquisition has got its position, so the focus of negotiation research has been shifted to negotiation in classroom. Various studies have been carried to explore negotiation itself and the relationship between negotiation and language proficiency development. However, there is a lack in empirical studies on classroom negotiation or teacher-student interaction in China. In view of this shortcoming, the purpose of the present study will be to describe the negotiation facts in high school classrooms and to describe how teachers and students are making efforts to achieve mutual understanding, using new language forms and providing new information, in the light of psycholinguistic interactionalist theories.In this paper, firstly the frequency of negotiated interaction and non-negotiated interaction, teacher-initiated negotiation and student-initiated negotiation, the distribution of negotiation of meaning/form/content and their distribution in different classroom activities are counted respectively. Then teacher's initiation in negotiation is coded according to the function of "acts" in FLIAS. Students' corresponding output is also analyzed by quantitative and qualitative means.By using classroom observation, the study yields the following findings:Firstly, negotiated interaction takes up a small proportion in high school classrooms, and no student-initiated negotiation is found. Teachers seem more inclined to negotiate meaning and content with the students, rather than form. Secondly, teachers employ various ways to initiate negotiation, but not all these ways can promote students' more and better output, as certain initiation ways are comprehension-oriented. For those output-oriented ways, the output made by students shows difference in quantity and quality.Generally speaking, negotiation is expected to play an important role in high school classrooms, considering its effect in achieving mutual understanding, modifying language and pushing on the conversation, but teachers seem to be unaware of the importance of this role, for teachers are not taking full advantage of negotiation to promote students' language performances.The results of the present study, on the one hand, can illuminate pedagogy, namely, that by negotiation, teachers can create a linguistic, cognitive and affective environment more beneficial for learners, to improve their ability in using the language and in communication. On the other hand, they prove that classroom is a productive place for investigating teacher-students interaction and its effects on second language learning.