Principles of negotiation in the classroom setting(36799)-英语教育-(101)-21英语网

本文作者： BY XU SHISHENG

　　NEGOCIATION is very important in class teaching and language acquisition. However, its importance hasn’t been recognized by many English teachers. The reason for it may be concluded as the following.

　　1. Students dare not open their mouth in order to avoid making mistakes. They assume that it seems very silly if you make mistakes while speaking English.

　　2. Many teachers don’t realize its importance in language acquisition. In their mind, language learning is to learn grammar. So all the classes are grammar-based. They’re keen on introducing different lexis and grammar rules to their students.

　　3. The existing assessment rules lead English teachers to believe that learning language is only to achieve a high score. A teacher’s aim is to help his students pass all kinds of exams until the students go to college. So the teachers pay no attention to arousing the student’s interest in negotiation, nor do they try to develop the students’ ability in thinking.

　　In this paper, the term negotiation refers to the modification and information restructuring that take place when learners and their interlocutors experience difficulty in understanding messages. Participants cooperate with each other while learning and teaching in order to get the mutual understanding. During negotiation, participants work together to arrive at message comprehension using resources such as comprehension checks, confirmation requests, clarification requests and some other new ways of negotiation of meaning.

　　As far as we know, interactions and negotiation have a very close relationship between each other. Compared with negotiation, interaction is filled with challenges, which might lead to success or failure during students learning in class. However, during the process of interaction, hindrance or misunderstanding will be produced either from teachers and students or among students. The two sides often come to consensus by negotiation automatically. In the negotiation process some learners may bring in background information that others do not have, which leads in a natural way to teaching of new facts about culture, geography, science and so on.

　　Example:

　　A: What have you got to do this afternoon?

　　B: Oh I’m going to repair the child bar.

　　A: What do you mean CHILD bar?

　　B: Uh it’s a metal bar that goes acr… has to be fixed from one side of the car I mean from one side of the back seat to the other for the BABY seat to go on.

　　A: Ah…

　　As A indicates he does not understand CHILD bar, B feels obliged to provide an explanation. We can tell that B seems to assume that A must be unfamiliar with the object in question, since he begins his explanation with ‘it’s a metal bar that…’ If B had thought A was familiar with the object but did not know the name for it, he would probably have explained it as ‘it’s THE metal bar that…’

　　Principles of negotiation in teaching

　　1. Negotiation activity should be colorful.

　　Students should gain from it knowledge diversities after communicating with people from varied cultures and places. Knowledge diversities can help form the varied intelligence for students. This will help the mental development of learning through use. In short, they need to combine language learning with intercultural communication.

　　2. Positive interdependence is necessary.

　　Both sides in negotiation need to play mutual supplement in negotiation. Thus their relationship should be interdependent.

　　3. The content of negotiation should possess sociality.

　　We emphasize sociality a lot nowadays, which means relating the teaching content with our real life. Teachers can make full use of the text and students can construct their knowledge systems according to their own experience of study and life.

　　4. Negotiation should have outcome.

　　Outcome is of great importance. It puts more emphasis on the output of content than language itself. Output of content achieves the outcome of language integrating with culture. The successful outcome of the content will promote students interest of language and culture.

　　5. Individual accountability is built in negotiation activity.

　　A. Negotiation activity is designed correctly. In class teaching, teachers should help students design a practical negotiation plan in order to avoid students wasting time. If they don’t use vocabulary effectively, they will lose the value of the communication.

　　B. Good material

　　Teachers should provide students with material suitable for negotiation. In order to achieve this, the material should be practical and meaningful. This negotiation inspires the students to master the essence of material.

　　C. Everyone participate. No one just sits and watches.

　　Teachers should help students form a habit of negotiation by monitoring their activities development. Students of different levels should also be provided with different negotiation material.

　　6. Social as well as academic goals are identified.

　　Academic goals refer to development of language thinking and mentality. Social goals refers to a spirit of cooperation between students and others, it is also the driving force of self-development.

　　7. In the process of negotiation, the ways and time of error-correction should be taken into great consideration so that students can attain the sense of safety.

　　Students are supposed to make a variety of mistakes while negotiating. If the errors are not corrected promptly or in the right way and at the right time, they will be accumulated, which gradually leads to the fossilization. Negotiation in a safe language situation may lay a firm foundation for the negotiating activities. Therefore, a well-designed negotiating activity is of great help to the positive transfer of motivation.

　　8. Negotiation inspires students to acquire the ability of vocabulary acquisition.

　　Teachers are bound to get students to sense the relevant core vocabulary according to the subjects of conversation, which may be of great use to enlarge their vocabulary and acquire more words. In the course of negotiation, learners develop their vocabulary knowledge. They acquire not only new words but also new meanings associated with words they have already learned. So students are supposed to have more opportunities to perceive the words.

　　9. The idea of equality should be taken into consideration in negotiation.

　　To start with, teachers create a safe and peaceful language situation for students. Students are asked to express the position and point of view and negotiate with teachers in an equal way.

　　10. Negotiation is real communication.

　　If it is a quasi-communication, students may lack a motivation to communicate, nor may they be willing to communicate so that there is lack of an effective communication.

　　11. In order to put more information into the negotiation activity, teachers are supposed to provide students with comprehensible input, which means information that students can understand and feedback promptly.

　　As for comprehensible input, the contents as well as the language should be taken into consideration, apart from visual information and non-visual information. The information inputted should be related to the life, study and work of the students so that students are able to construct their own language systems.

　　12. Negotiation may be ready or not and it may happen in the classroom or not.

　　With an aim to make sure that there is a good result of negotiation, teachers may arrange some activities to help students make preparations for negotiation in view of the ability of students. It should be mentioned that these activities is supposed to be non-linguistic.

　　13. The combination of negotiation and writing.

　　Teachers may ask students to recall the contents of negotiation, which can consolidate the spoken language.

　　14. Negotiation can be combined with cooperation learning and inquiry learning.

　　Negotiated topics and questions are always much more stressed in cooperation and inquiry learning that the answers are. It is common that teachers and students enjoy negotiating on a topic or question, during which the process of negotiation is emphasized instead of the outcome. Only in this way can students express their ideas freely.

　　15. Negotiation attaches great importance to meaning as well as form.

　　Based on the effective negotiation, the grammatical learning can be promoted from explicit knowledge to implicit knowledge.

　　16. Plan speaking tasks that involve negotiation for meaning.

　　Learners make progress by communicating in the target language because interaction necessarily involves trying to understand and make yourself understood. By asking for clarification, repetition, or explanations during conversations, learners get the people they are speaking with to address them with language at a level they can learn from and understand.

　　17. Avoidance of topic is necessary when both sides fail to reach an agreement on a certain topic in negotiation.

　　It is desirable that both sides can "negotiation" to terminate the topic or abandon. Negotiation is two-way. Negotiation usually happens in a peaceful situation and the argument is the best to be reduced to the least.

　　Conclusion

　　Negotiation is of great help to provide students with a friendly surrounding in which students can be affected emotionally. At the same time, students can enjoy more opportunities of prompt and appropriate feedbacks. All in all, negotiation has been found to increase the motivation of the students and stimulate vocabulary acquisition in the classroom setting.

　　

　　

　　