Impact Of Self-negotiation Principle Of Problem-based L2Leaming On Leamers’ Oral Output

Inspired by Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Long’s concept of negotiation of meaning,empirical studies have revealed promoting impact of linguistic output and interactivenegotiation on L2development. However, few researches focus on the potential impact ofnegotiation on language output, particularly oral output.The current research aims to fill in this research niche by studying the impact ofself-negotiation on learners’ oral output in the context of Problem-based L2Learning(PBLL). Qualitative data from a case study are used to describe and demonstrate theself-negotiation, cognitive mechanism of “linking”,“riffling” and “converging”, as well asthe linguistic output of8PBLL learners who are non-English majors in a university inBeijing. Quantitative data from an empirical study of PBLL, in which16non-Englishmajors of the same university took part, are analyzed by SPSS19.0.The case study revealed (1) that PBLL learners achieve self-negotiation via cognitivemechanism of “linking”,“riffling” and “converging”, with the purpose of, by means of,and with the outcome of individual or within-group self-consistency, self-coordination,self-identification, self-ratification, self-satisfication and self-licensing, and (2) that theindividual and collective self-negotiation principles guide and constrain the linguisticcognition and output of PBLL learners, transforming PBLL into a problem-based,self-negotiated language learning process. The empirical study (1) showed no significantdifference in the score, fluency, accuracy and complexity of the experimental group, whichfailed to verify the research hypotheses that the PBLL interactions guided and constrainedby the self-negotiation principle improve L2learners’ oral output in terms of fluency,accuracy, and complexity, and (2) suggested that the score and oral output accuracy of theexperimental group were significantly better than those of the control group in the post-test,while the oral output fluency of the control group was significantly worse in the post-testthan that in the pre-test, which might be interpreted that PBLL practice had a potentiallypositive impact on the participants from the perspectives of language attrition, self-identity,and the Pygmalion Effect.