A Study On The Effect Of Negotiation On Students’ Immediate Utterance In EFL Classroom Instruction Of Primary Schools

Negotiation, as the high-level pattern of interaction in SLA, refers to the modificationoccurring between teachers and students to get mutual comprehension. It is widely acceptedthat negotiation could contribute to set up favorable conditions to provide morecomprehensible input, raise learners’ attention to language forms and produce comprehensibleoutput to check their interlanguage hypotheses. Recently various researches on negotiationboth at home and abroad explore negotiation in singular perspective on comprehensible inputrather than multiple perspectives including the negotiated process and the effect of negotiationon immediate utterance.The purpose of the study is to find out how T-S negotiation occurs and the effect ofnegotiation on students’ immediate utterance in EFL classroom in primary schools in China.Based on the purpose, the study stresses on three aspects such as the current situation ofnegotiation in primary EFL classroom instruction, the effective strategies of teachers initiatingnegotiation in EFL classroom, and the effect of negotiation on students’ immediate utterancein syntactic complexity.The study selects samples (N=131) randomly from Grade Six in a primary school ofDalian. The data is collected by observation and recording and analyzed by T-test andANOVA test with the help of SPSS quantitatively and qualitatively. The study indicates thatnegotiation of content could produce students’ better immediate utterance in syntacticcomplexity. T-initiated strategy of confirmation check and elicitation are used more frequently.Particularly, elicitation could lead to students’ better immediate utterance in syntacticcomplexity. In negotiation of meaning, elicitation could cause students’ more compleximmediate utterance while confirmation check is applied more frequently in EFL classroom.In negotiation of form, the original sentence of negotiation is the main factor to determinecomplexity of students’ immediate utterance, so there is no significant difference amongT-initiated strategies focusing on linguistic forms.There are some pedagogical implications of the study. Teacher should initiate morenegotiation in EFL classroom, especially negotiation of content to bring about students’ betterimmediate utterance with personal thinking. Meanwhile, teacher should initiate negotiation byusing strategies properly. However, due to the research focuses on the T-initiated strategies innegotiation, there are several limitations in the study. The students’ position in negotiation andthe effective S-initiated strategies in negotiation await further study.