A Study Of Teacher-Student Negotiation In Intensive Reading Classes For English Majors

With the implementation of communicative language teaching and task-based teaching approaches in English teaching in China, classroom interaction, especially teacher-student negotiation has been deemed more and more important in recent years and attracted the research interest of some Chinese scholars. However, most of these studies on teacher-student negotiation are still lingering on introducing and reviewing relevant studies abroad. There is a shortage of empirical studies on classroom interaction and the number of studies for teacher-student negotiation in particular is few and far between, which is not in line with the fact that China is a country that has the largest population of English learners.Therefore, the present study, based on a selective review of the relevant literature to date, set in the context of intensive reading classes for English majors in a teachers'college, investigates how teacher-student negotiation takes place and affects student output from both psycholinguistic and social interactionist theoretical perspectives by means of an empirical study, hoping that it may become a helpful complement to the research of SLA.Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the transcribed data derived from classroom observation and recording, the present study reveals that: (1) Negotiated interaction between teacher and student only accounts for a small proportion (29.4%) of classroom interaction in intensive reading classes for English majors.(2) Negotiation of content occurs most frequently among the three different negotiation types, taking up 69.4% of the total occurrence, which is followed in second and third place by negotiation of form and negotiation of meaning, taking up respectively 20.4% and 10.2% of the total.(3) Negotiation devices including elicitation, repair-initiation, confirmation check, comprehension check, clarification request, prompt, and clue are employed by teachers, which shows that in the classes observed the teachers are endeavoring to use various devices to initiate and sustain negotiation so as to maximally encourage students'participation.(4) Negotiation on the whole is effective in eliciting more output from the students and resulting in enhanced output with greater syntactic complexity. But different negotiation types and devices seem to affect student output differently. Negotiation of content is more effective in eliciting more student output of better quality than negotiation of meaning and negotiation of form. Among all the negotiation devices employed by the teachers, elicitation and clarification request are more effective than the others in promoting both the quality and the quantity of student output.The results of this study present a true picture of how negotiation is conducted in intensive reading classes for English majors and demonstrate that teacher-student negotiation can really help create favorable linguistic, cognitive as well as affective environments in which both the students'ability of using the target language and their general cognitive ability can be greatly promoted. In addition, the present study also proves that L2 classroom is really a productive place for exploring student process of L2 development, thus being worthwhile for further studies to be conducted.