A Study Of Teacher-Student Negotiated Interaction In EFL Class Of Junior High School

The research on negotiated interaction has been increasingly popular in the recent three decades since it is widely acknowledged by researchers that negotiated interaction would contribute to providing learners with more comprehensible input,drawing their attention on language forms and providing them with more chances to produce comprehensible output.However,empirical studies of negotiated interaction in China,especially the studies focusing on EFL classrooms in fundamental education,are few.By observing the negotiated interaction in class and exploring the effective types and devices adopted,teachers are reminded to pay attention on and improve students' oral English.Therefore,the present study aims to explore the different kinds of negotiated interaction and negotiation devices applied in EFL classes of junior high school in China,and their impact on students' oral output.Combined with the research purpose,this study focuses on the following three research questions: 1.What kinds of negotiation occur in the observed reading class and how are they distributed? 2.What negotiation devices are used by teachers to initiate and sustain the negotiated interaction? 3.How do different kinds of negotiated interaction and negotiation devices influence on pushing students' oral output in class?In order to answer these research questions,the present study adopts the qualitative and quantitative methods of research,taking students and English teachers in the junior high school as research subjects.After classroom observation and recording,as well as the analysis of the transcribed data,the study gets the following findings: firstly,three types of negotiated interaction occur in the observed EFL reading classes,among which,negotiation of content is the most commonly used one,followed by negotiation of meaning and then negotiation of form.Secondly,teachers in the observed reading class tend to employ various negotiation devices to initiate and sustain the negotiated interaction,mainly including elicitation,prompt,confirmation check,and repair-initiation.Thirdly,different kinds of negotiated interaction and different negotiation devices affect students' oral output differently.Among the three kinds of negotiated interaction,negotiation of content is more effective in pushing students' output than negotiation of meaning and negotiation of form.And among all the negotiation devices employed,elicitation,prompt and repair-initiation are more effective than the others in promoting the students' oral output.The results of the study present what is actually going on in EFL reading class of junior high school,and indicate that teacher-student negotiation indeed has the function of creating opportunities for students' oral expression and improving their ability of using target language in communication.Besides,the present study also proves that second language classroom is really a productive place for exploring students' second language development process.