Teacher-Student Negotiated Interaction And Complexity Of Learner's Immediate Output In Chinese Senior High School EFL Classroom

Since 1980s, the research on teacher-student interaction on second language acquisition has enjoyed popularity. Negotiation, as a particular form of interaction, also has captured the attention of researchers.In the field of classroom second or foreign language acquisition, the term "negotiated interaction" or "negotiation" refers to the modification occurring in conversations between language teachers and learners. Theories and researches show that negotiation contributes to second language learning by providing favorable linguistic environment in terms of comprehensible input, comprehensible output and the formation of learners' interlanguage system.Various studies have been carried out 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. Meanwhile, a large number of studies focus on description of EFL classroom instead of exploring the effect of negotiation on comprehensible input and output.The purpose of the present study is to find out how T-S negotiation is carried out and the effect of negotiation on learners' immediate output in Chinese senior high schools. The study focuses on three aspects: a) how does negotiation take place in EFL classroom; b) how do teachers adopt negotiation devices in the process of negotiation; c) what is the effect of negotiation and conversational negotiation devices on learner's immediate output.By means of classroom observation, check-list record, audio record, transcripts of audio record, and questionnaire interview, the present study gives a general picture of how negotiation carry out in different teaching tasks in senior high school EFL classroom. The study also describes how teachers employ negotiation devices to elicit students' immediate output. After processing data with SPSS, the study describes the complexity of students' immediate output elicited in negotiation and discusses the effect of negotiation and negotiate devices on students' output.Based on the findings the study puts forward suggestions for teachers concerning how to carry out negotiation more effectively and how to elicit better output from the students in classroom teacher-student negotiation.