Teacher-student Negotiated Interaction And L2 Learners' Oral Proficiency Development

In the past two decades, negotiation has attracted much research interests in the field of SLA. From psycholinguistic interactionist view, negotiated interaction between L2 learners and their interlocutors provides favorable psycholinguistic conditions to access comprehensible input and to produce comprehensible output. Sociocultural theory takes an alternative perspective on interaction in L2 learning, which emphasizes the role of social context and meditational tool involved in negotiation; and methodologically this approach emphasizes analysis of micro-process of change.L2 researches on negotiation so far have been carried out with more focus on immediate effect of negotiation on target language production of L2 learners; few of them are concerned with longitudinal effect of negotiation on L2 development, also studies in China linguistic complexity of L2 learners has not been given equal attention as accuracy and fluency. Thus the purpose of the present study is to find out the immediate and longitudinal effect of classroom T-S negotiated interaction on the development of linguistic complexity of a Chinese L2 learner's oral English.Taking on a broader notion of negotiation and sociolinguistic perspectives, the present study, attempts to use a longitudinal case study approach to explore both immediate and long-term effects of T-S negotiated interaction on the development of linguistic complexity of a Chinese L2 learner's oral English, and to explore the micro-process and mechanism of this development as well. The study, with a college student as a case study participant, using a variety of data collection procedures including oral English tests, audio-recording of classroom process, the learner's notes and after-class interviews, data analysis in both quantitative and qualitative ways yields the following findings:1) In respect to the observed changes in linguistic complexity of the learner's oral English over 3-month classroom learning, syntactically the learner tends to produce longer utterances, use more coordinate phrases and complex nominals, lexically the learner tends to use more sophisticated lexical words and more words of different types, there is a gradual development of syntactic complexity and lexical complexity of the learner's oral English, and enhanced T-S negotiation does play a role in facilitating L2 acquisition.2) In terms of the immediate effect of classroom T-S negotiation on linguistic complexity of the learner's oral English, the negotiated interaction between the learner and the teacher has drawn the learner's attention to his initial utterance and stimulated the learner's attempt to internalize the teacher's scaffolding, the learner's uptakes gradually evolve from simple acknowledgement into complicated incorporation over one semester. The learner also successfully perceives linguistic features of the utterances of the teacher or other learners in his uptakes during the negotiated interaction between other learners and the teacher, and incorporates them into his later-on output.3) With regard to the detailed process and mechanism in the development of linguistic complexity of the learner's oral English, the growth of ability to use the word "personality" (as a lexical sample) undergoes several stages, namely, initial imitation in form of private speech, early trial use, freer use but also more rehearsal, and frequent and spontaneous use; similarly, the growth of attributive clause (as a syntactic sample) undergoes such stages as zero use, early emergence and increased use, and stable use. On the whole, development of the learner's linguistic complexity is a process of his internalizing interaction with more capable others, during which private speech and imitation plays a facilitative role.The study presents a real picture of the development of the learner's oral performance in the Chinese EFL classroom, in view of the findings it puts forward some pedagogical implications for language teachers, discusses some limitations of the research, and makes some suggestions for future researchers to undertake.