Negotiation Of Form And Explicit Correction In High School English Classrooms: A Sociocultural Perspective

Form-focused instruction is of great importance in communicative classrooms. There arebasically three kinds of teaching strategies of form-focused instruction: explicit correction,negotiation of form, and recast. This study focuses on negotiation of form (NOF) and explicitcorrection by observing authentic English classrooms. It is conducted from the socioculturalperspective in second language acquisition (SLA).This study is a descriptive study on20observed and transcribed lessons of an ordinaryrural high school and20lessons of a key urban high school. All the NOF and explicitcorrection episodes have been carefully grouped together from the data and all the linguisticstrategies used and cognitive and social processing patterns have been coded. After that, theanalysis is done on the linguistic, cognitive and social processing dimensions according to theanalytical tool-Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (SDA).This study tries to answer the following three research questions:1) What and how NOFand explicit correction are used in the data?2) What are the features of NOF and explicitcorrection on the linguistic dimension? How do the two types of classrooms differ?3) Whatare the features of NOF on the cognitive and social processing dimensions? What are thesimilarities and differences in the two types of classrooms?The findings of this study are:(1) There are not many episodes of NOF and explicitcorrection in the data, indicating that these two kinds of focus on form strategies have notbeen widely used in authentic classrooms. The most commonly used linguistic strategy ofNOF is elicitation, while explicit correction on grammatical misuses occurs most frequently.(2) On the linguistic dimension, episodes of NOF are mostly initiated by teachers, andmost episodes of explicit correction are given without linguistic explanations. The fewstudent-initiated NOF episodes and NOFs initiated not by mistakes are found to be more inthe key school data; while there are more EC episodes with linguistic explanations in theordinary high school.(3) On the cognitive dimension, exploratory classroom episodes are quite few, and mostepisodes are cumulative. On the social processing dimension, only expert/novice pattern isfound. The students in both schools are cooperative and they seldom challenge teachers’authority. The teachers in the key high school are better at offering scaffoldings and play aguidance role, while the ordinary school teachers are more like knowledge givers.Despite the efforts made, this study is not without limitations. Undeniably, the amount ofdata is limited. Besides, this is not a longitudinal study, therefore, the deep nature of NOF and explicit correction may not be shown completely.