Teacher-student Negotiated Interaction And Its Effect On The Complexity Of Students' Immediate Oral Output In The Classrooms Of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language In Xinjiang

As far as language classroom is concerned, negotiation refers to the conversational adjustment, modification or propulsion that are made by the learners and the interlocutors in order to realize mutual understanding, or to gain more accurate language forms of expressions, or to obtain more relevant information. Many studies done by the western scholars (such as Pica, 1991;Foster, 1998;Lyster and Ranta, 1997, etc.) suggest that negotiation is the basic level of teacher-student conversational interaction, and it proves to be an important factor that influences the input and output of the target language. In recent years, negotiation has also become quite appealing in the SLA realm in China, successive investigations have been conducted concerning the relationship between negotiation and language learning. Indeed, most of these studies have focused on the EFL classrooms. The previous investigations have all paved the way for the present study, which treats the Psycholinguistic and Social Interactionist Theories, Comprehensible Input and Output Hypotheses as the theoretical framework, and employs the analytical interaction system modified by Boulima (1999) and the measuring methods proposed by Brock (1986), to probe into the teacher-student (T-S) negotiated interaction and the effect on the complexity of the students'oral output in the classrooms of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL) for the foreign students in Xinjiang.The thesis is intended to sketch a general picture of the T-S negotiated interaction in the TCFL classrooms in Xinjiang, including the ratio of negotiated and non-negotiated interactions, and the frequency distribution of the negotiation subtypes, and to explore the relationship between the T-S negotiated interaction and the students'immediate oral output. The data-gathering instruments employed in the present study are non-participation observation, recordings and questionnaires. The main findings regarding the TCFL classrooms in Xinjiang are listed as follows:1. The total ratio of negotiated interaction to non-negotiated interaction indicates that the classroom teaching is not highly predominated by non-negotiated interactions (35.82%) other than negotiated ones (64.18%), and this is quite different from the EFL classrooms where Initiation-Response-Feedback mode is reported to account for the major part of the whole T-S interaction in the previous research. Confronted with difficulties in communication, the teachers are likely to be the first to initiate negotiation most of the time. However, there are several occasions when the students initiate negotiation to fix up the T-S interaction breakdowns though with very low frequency at 16.85%.2. Among the three types of negotiation, the negotiation of content enjoys the highest frequency (71.62%), followed by the negotiation of meaning, and the frequency of negotiation of form that has occurred is the lowest, constituting only 9.91%. The most continually applied ways of initiating negotiation by the teachers are comprehension checks, repairs and prompts respectively for negotiation of meaning, form and content. Similar to the teachers, students are inclined to take advantage of comprehension checks to start negotiation of meaning, whereas students tend to employ confirmation checks more often than other devices while conducting negotiation of form and content.3. When content is the focus of negotiation, the students utter most communicative units (c-units) (285), with sentence-nodes (S-nodes) at .35; among the task types, the speaking practice yields most c-units (152) and S-nodes (.53); all of the eight acts can elicit students'immediate output in most cases, and students are most likely to present most c-units (106) after the teachers'prompts, and the S-nodes after the teachers'act of elicitation rank first with .40.On the whole, the present study has achieved the goal of presenting a real picture of the TCFL classrooms in Xinjiang concerning how T-S negotiated interaction is conducted and concerning what are the effects on the students'immediate oral output. Great efforts have been made to provide relevant evidence and cross-reference data for the language teaching and further research associated with T-S negotiated interaction in the TCFL classrooms.