A Study Of Teacher-Student Negotiated Interaction On China’s Online One-to-One English Teaching Platform

As the country with the largest number of English learners in world,China’s English training has developed rapidly in recent years.With the fast development of information technology,online one-to-one English teaching websites and platforms have emerged and enjoyed great popularity in China.The purpose of the current study is to explore the EFL learning in this new teaching model and analyze the negotiated interaction between teachers and students in online one-to-one classrooms,as well as its effect on students’ immediate oral production.The study focuses on the following three research questions: 1.What kinds of negotiated interaction occur in the observed online real-time one-to-one classes and how are they distributed? 2.How do students and teachers participate in these negotiation process? 3.How effective are different negotiated interaction types and negotiation devices in promoting students’ immediate oral production?The participants of the current study are nine children aged 8-10.They have taken online English classes on D platform which is one of the most popular one-to-one English learning platforms in China.The teachers are all English native speakers either from the United States,Canada or the United Kingdom.The study collected,transcribed,and analyzed the corpus of nine lessons,with one lesson from each student.The results of the study show that negotiated interaction accounts for 52% in online one-to-one interaction between teacher and student.And negotiation of content occurs most frequently among the three different negotiation types,which is followed by negotiation of meaning and negotiation of form.Among negotiated interaction discovered,83% of the negotiated interaction is initiated by teachers and 17% by students.To increase learners engagement,teachers tend to use various negotiationdevices such as clarification request,clue,and elicitation to initiate and sustain the negotiated interaction.And students not only employ challenge,clarification request and elicitation to initiate negotiation but also provide the potential trigger for another round of negotiation by informing or informative acknowledging.On the whole,the negotiated interaction is more effective in eliciting learners’ oral production with greater syntactic complexity and sentence length,but different types of negotiated interaction and negotiation devices work differently.Negotiation of content is more effective in eliciting more student output of better quality than other two.Among all negotiation devices employed by teachers,clarification request,clue,and prompt perform better than the others in eliciting greater quality and quantity of students’ oral production.Since the one-to-one online classroom supports multiple interaction such as text,image,voice,interactive whiteboard,the process of negotiation is diverse.And these functions help the negotiated interaction proceed successfully.The study presents how negotiation is conducted in online one-to-one English classes,and demonstrates that the teacher-student negotiation can help create favorable linguistic environments in which the learners’ oral proficiency and the ability of using the target language in communication can be greatly improved.Meanwhile,the current study also proves that online one-to-one language learning is a productive place to explore the learners’ of foreign language development,thus being worth exploring for further research.