A Study On Negotiation Of Meaning In NS-NNS Interaction

The study aims to examine the meaning negotiation pattern on children's online 1-on-1 EFL classes in China through a study of online classes.Six primary school students aged 8-10 were invited to attend the research.They are taking online classes with native English teachers to practice their reading,listening,and speaking skills.The author collected,transcribed,and analyzed the corpus of six classes,with one class from each student.The results of the study showed that there were 28 meanings of negotiation in the six lessons,and the average meaning negotiation turns of each lesson accounted for 12%of the total turn.The online English class did not set too much content that could lead to meaningful negotiation.Among the meaning negotiation discovered.42.8%of the meaning negotiation was initiated by teachers and 57.2%by students.The regular way students initiate meaning negotiation is when they met new content or a word and were not able to read it,which will appeal to the teachers' assistance.Due to network delays or sporadic network problems,some conversations have a split meaning negotiation.Since the 1-on-1 online English class has many functions such as text,image,voice,and online textbook,the meaning negotiation process is more diverse,which combines with the modes of traditional face-to-face teaching,text-based SCMC,and audio-based SCMC.Some meaning negotiation strategies are similar to other teaching methodologies,but others are different.In the real online 1-on-1 classes,because meaning negotiation is relatively time-consuming,some teachers will prepare a large number of teaching aids such as pictures and props to assist the understanding of new words,thus saving class time to cover as much teaching content as possible.