University Efl Classroom Environment Under The Consultative Interaction With The Students Output

Language learning takes place in contexts, naturalistic or instructed. Taking China's overall language learning environment into consideration, a foreign language is more often learned through classroom instruction than from naturalistic exposure. In light of this, classroom interaction, which arguably provides opportunities conducive to learning and acquisition becomes an issue worthy of extensive research. Among all forms of classroom interaction, negotiated interaction between teachers and learners are believed to be the most beneficial for favorable learning outcomes to occur in virtue of the meditative role teachers often play in the process. Therefore, this study takes negotiated classroom interaction as its subject of investigation and attempts to examine its effects on student production from both a psycholinguistic and a social interactionist perspective. To serve the purpose of the study, negotiated interaction is classified into three specific types, namely negotiation of form, negotiation of meaning and negotiation of content. Two general research questions are raised, which are, firstly, what the frequency distribution of three negotiation types is in college EFL classrooms and, secondly, what their respective effects are on different aspects of student production.The study reveals that:Firstly, negotiation of meaning and of content occur at a much higher frequency in college EFL classrooms than negotiation of form. Negotiation of form, though expected to improve the accuracy of student production in the form of enhanced output, is proved generally ineffective due to multiple reasons.Secondly, by and large, negotiation of meaning is successful in solving miscommunications. Among all conversational modification devices, clarification request appears the most effective in yielding students' enhanced output while confirmation check with trigger modified most favorable for students' comprehended input.Thirdly, negotiation of content leads to more student output of a higher syntactic complexity than non-negotiation and taxes in a great measure both students' linguistic and cognitive processing competence.Fourthly, teachers' mediation by means of language in negotiated interaction can serve as both linguistic, affective and cognitive scaffolding for students to access their zone of proximal development and to construct their own learning at a pace and in a form most facilitative to acquisition.The results of the present study on the one hand present a real picture of the status quo of negotiated interaction in current Chinese college EFL classrooms so that both its benefits and flaws are exposed, and on the other hand shed light on future pedagogical decisions and improvements for negotiated interaction to play a more effective and facilitative role in students' language acquisition and general cognitive development.