The Study Of Negotiation In Teacher-student Writing Conference In The Chinese EFL Context

Teacher-student writing conferencing has been popular and applied widely inboth L1and L2writing teaching, because it is found that writing conferences canfacilitate the interaction between teachers and students, enhance students’ awarenessof their own writing, and give students an opportunity to participate in discussionsand better understand their teachers’ responses. In the EFL context, China included,writing conferencing has been practiced, too, though not in a widespread way.However, very few empirical studies have been conducted on EFL T-S writingconferencing. Therefore, this study aims to explore teacher-student writingconferencing in the Chinese EFL teaching context, especially focusing on howteachers and students perform writing conferencing, the extent of negotiationsinvolved in writing conferencing, and the effect of writing conferencing on students’subsequent writing revisions.A case study approach was employed in the study. One Chinese EFL teacherand her three English major students from a South China key university participatedin the study. The study lasted for8weeks. The three students were required to writea feature first according to the teacher’s assignment requirement. After the teacherprovided them with written feedback, the three students had conferencing with theteacher one by one in the teacher’s office. The researcher observed and audiotapedthe teacher-student conferencing with permission from both the teacher and thestudents. All the three students were asked to revise their original feature at homeand submit the revised version on the following day after the conferencing,. Twoweeks away from the conferencing, the students were requested to revise theiroriginal feature again, in the teachers’ office this time. Two weeks after the secondrevision, the researcher administered a semi-structured retrospective interview to allthree students one by one in order to make sure that students’ revisions could betraced back to the writing conferencing. The resulting data, mainly including the audiotaped conferences and the students’ three writing drafts, were analyzed bothqualitatively and quantitatively in response to the research questions.Data analysis revealed the following findings. First, the teacher dominated thewriting conferences, guiding and controlling the whole process of each conference.Conversely, the students were relatively passive, occasionally raised questions andtended to accept the teacher’s revision suggestions without rejection. Second, abouthalf of the episodes in the three conferences involved negotiation. The three students,specifically, varied in the extent of the negotiation involved owing to their differentpersonality and preparations for this writing task. Third, the students could almostalways successfully revise the negotiated revision points in the immediate revision,and only a few revision points without negotiation were revised successfully. Finally,the students still revised the negotiated revision points more and better than thosenon-negotiated revision points in the delayed revised drafts. Particularly, studentseven did better in the delayed revision than in the immediate revision for somerevision points.The present study has validated the effectiveness of writing conferences andsuggested that writing conferencing should be more commonly used as a way ofgiving feedback to student writing in the EFL context, because the negotiationinvolved in conferencing can help improve students’ subsequent revision and writingquality.