1.1 Overview of the literature review
It explains the different definitions of negotiation from different researchers first and then introduces the types of negotiation. At last, it will give a brief review of the empirical studies conducted earlier on the effects of negotiation on writing teaching from the foreign researches and the domestic researches.
1.2 Definition of negotiation
The term "negotiated interaction" or "negotiation" refers to the modification occurring in the conversations between NSs and NNSs, between a target language teacher and the learners, or between advanced NNSs and less proficient NNSs. Negotiation, as a particular form of interaction, has enjoyed popularity since 1980, and a variety of researches have been made to describe negotiated interaction.
Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics defines negotiation as follows:
(in conversation) what speakers do in order to achieve successful communication. For conversation to progress naturally and for speakers to be able to understand each other it may be necessary for them to: (a) indicate that they understand or do not understand, or that they want the conversation to continue. (b) help each other to express ideas. (c) make corrections when necessary to what is said or how it is said. These aspects of the work which speakers do in order to make successful conversation are known as negotiation, in Conversational Analysis. (Richards et al. 1985:190)
Scarcella & Higa (1981) also offer an insightful definition of the term?"negotiated interaction":
When participating in face-to-face interaction, conversationalists cooperate to sustain the conversation and establish understanding (Goffman 1974). As Garfinkel (1976) points out, this is an ongoing negotiation process. Here we describe it in terms of the "work" involved in helping one another to communicate, for example, by jointly expressing message, filling in lapses in the conversation, indicating gaps in understanding, and repairing communication breakdowns. (Scarcella&Higa 1981:410).
We can see from these definitions that negotiation serves two primary functions: (1) to identify and repair communication breakdowns in a conversation to achieve mutual comprehension between interlocutors. (2) to maintain and contribute to the flow of ongoing conversations through joint effects of the interlocutors.
In L2 acquisition studies, the term refers to modification occurring in the conversations between a target language teacher and the learners. It is applied to the special characteristics of communication between speakers, one of whom is speaking a second language (Liu and Zhao 2004). The stated functions of negotiation are further analyzed with a view to the source or nature of concurrent communication breakdowns. In present study the term "negotiation" refers to the process whereby speakers attempt to achieve mutual understanding, or generate more accurate L2 forms, or produce more information related to a certain topic (Rulon & McCreary 1986; Long 1985; Lyster&Ranta 1997; Van Den Branden 1997).
1.3 Types of Negotiation
It is accepted by most researchers that negotiation falls on three types: negotiation of meaning, negotiation of form and negotiation of content (Rulon& McCreary 1986; Lyster&Ranta 1997; Van den Branden 1997). In the early research on negotiation, "negotiation" or "negotiated interactions" both refer to "negotiation of meaning". Recently the denotation of "negotiation" has been expanded to "negotiation of form" and "negotiation of content".
Negotiation of meaning refers to "the process of spoken interaction between a native speaker and a nonnative speaker whereby the meaning of an unclear or misunderstood word or phrase is clarified to the satisfaction of both parties" (Young 1984:1). Later this definition is expanded to include the interaction between two NNSs. In either case, the term specifically refers to communication in which interlocutors focus on solving a communication problem in an attempt to reach mutual understanding (Gass1997).
Different from negotiation of meaning, negotiation of form is prompted by inappropriate or incorrect language use. In negotiation of form, while mutual understanding is sustained, one interlocutor attempts to push the other towards producing a formally more correct or more appropriate utterance (Van den Branden 1997: 592). Therefore, negotiation of form is in actual practice a type of corrective feedback, i.e. implicit or covert correction of linguistic errors. As Lyster & Ranta (1997: 42) point out, negotiation of form serves as the provision of corrective feedback that encourage learners' self-repair on accuracy and precision besides merely comprehensibility.
Another type of negotiation is known as negotiation of content. Rulon and Mc Creary (1986) define negotiation of content as "the process of spoken interaction, whereby the content of a previously encountered passage (oral or written) is clarified to ... either NSs or NNSs (Rulon and McCreary1986: 182). Liu and Zhao (2004) further expanded the connotation of negotiation of content. They pointed out negotiation of content is not the process of repair because it does not occur in response to communication breakdowns or formal errors, but to push exchanging of messages forward. Negotiation of content is the need of further communication. In negotiation of content, interlocutors mainly focus on eliciting additional information to carry the conversation forward, while in the previous two types of negotiation their focus lies in resolving communication problem or language problem without creating new information (Den Branden 1997: 592). According to Van den Branden, negotiation of meaning can be regarded as "side-sequence" to the main flow of conversation while negotiation of content continues the flow.
1.4 The effects of negotiation on writing teaching
1.4.1 The foreign researches into the effects of negotiation on writing teaching
Negotiation, typically associated with the Interactionist Hypothesis (Long, 1981), refers to certain tactics used in expert/novice pairs in order to solve communication problems, particularly in the area of conversational management and performed language functions. While the taxonomy of these tactics has grown (Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991), the most common features cited are confirmation checks, comprehension checks, and clarification requests. Goldstein & Conrad (1990) use three negotiation features to code the teacher talk: comprehension checks, clarification requests, and revision clarification requests.
High-proficiency matriculated English learners have been investigated in the following researches into negotiation. Goldstein and Conrad (1990) focus on the conferences of English as-a-second-language (ESL) learners, who have already matriculated into university-level coursework in the United States. The discourse of one teacher in conference with these three students is analyzed using the inter-actionist model of negotiation as well as turn-taking, questions, and topic nomination. They discover that in spite of teachers’ and learners’ perceptions, teacher talk do not necessarily promote interaction or revision. Not every student is able to help set the agenda, make their needs known, express their ideas and opinions, and ask questions to clarify meanings. They also find that the conferences vary in relation to the learners’ language proficiency with more negotiation occurring between the teacher and the more proficient learners rather than the less proficient learners, and that aside from individual differences in personality, cultural expectations for conversational roles may have affected learner participation in the conferences. Nonetheless, Goldstein and Conrad find that when the teacher and a student negotiate revisions, the subsequent revisions are almost always successful as measured by the degree to which they resolve a rhetorical problem. The researchers indicate that the learners’ errors are mostly of a rhetorical and not lexicon-grammatical nature due to the advanced proficiency of the learners, but the study does not differentiate the negotiation results by the focus of the revision talk on one or the other. Patthey-Chavez and Ferris (1997) investigate the role of learner proficiency and institutional expectations in teacher–learner writing conferences from a socio-cultural perspective, claiming that the writing conference is a ‘‘classic example of a teacher–led’’ ZPD. They report that in examining the role of learner proficiency (based on teacher judgments) and institutional expectations in the writing conferences of four teachers, the stronger students more actively participate in the writing conferences and are able to make more substantial revisions that involve the generation of new ideas. The weaker students, who participate less, however, are more likely to simply take the teacher’s suggestions and apply them directly to the next draft. The stronger students receive less direct, more mitigated, talk from the teachers than the lower proficiency learners. Nonetheless, the teachers still dominate the talk of the conferences in all cases: The stronger students contribute from 11 to 37 percent of the conference talk and the weaker students from 8 to 26 percent. As in the Goldstein and Conrad (1990) study, the learners are matriculated students enrolled either in the composition sequence of a prestigious private university or in a business major course and have few language concerns in their writing. In addition, Patthey-Chavez and Ferris look specifically at the trajectory of a limited number of revision topics prominent in the conferences involving argumentation and elaboration of ideas and not surface language concerns. Haneda (2000, 2004) examines the nature of teacher–learner writing conference discourse in relation to students’ subsequent revisions with learners in her Japanese foreign language classroom from the perspectives of activity theory, systemic functional linguistics, and situated literacy. Although she does not apply the frameworks of negotiation and scaffolding directly, her analysis of talk sequences about content and rhetorical issues reveals that learner participation is influenced by L2 proficiency in that advanced learners are more interested in ideational content and rhetorical choices while intermediate students are more concerned with language use issues. This difference in focus is reflected in the types of revisions made although the average number of revisions made in relation to conference discussion is the same for both proficiency groups. She also finds that across all the student content-talk sequences produce longer exchanges than those focusing on language use but that overall 73 percent of the conferences focus on language use.
The following foreign researchers explore that negotiation has a positive impact on writing. Negotiation has been observed in writing talk between peers (Mendonc¸ A & Johnson 1994; Nelson & Murphy 1993), learners and tutors in writing centers (Thonus 1998; Williams 2002, 2004), and teachers and learners in writing conferences (Goldstein & Conrad 1990; Patthey-Chavez & Ferris 1997) and linked with successful revision. Boomer et al (1992) confirm that negotiation has a significant effect on improving the first language and second language writing skills. Goldstein and Conrad (1990) analyzes the English learners’ writing meetings and finds that the learners who can negotiate with others will make more comprehensive changes to make their English writing better. Fiona (1999) studies two teachers’ writing lesson, and finds that Class A that adopt the student-student negotiation have more writing conversations and concern more about the content and the organization of the composition, but students don’t pay enough attention to peer reviews. Class B that adopt the teacher-student negotiation focus more on the accuracy of language forms, the students respond to teacher feedback more positively. Doreen (2009) employs two frameworks for analysis, negotiation and scaffolding, to investigate the discursive quality of two teachers, whose writing conferences with pre-matriculated ESL learners attend to very different writing concerns. She finds that the interface of negotiation and scaffolding indicates that when there is more negotiation around fewer topics, students must attend to the revision topic, which leads to more participation and may lead to successful revisions and learning. Furthermore, it appears that conferences which focus almost entirely on content and rhetorical issues promote more learner participation even with pre-matriculated L2 adult learners with limited experience in English academic writing.
From the above studies, we can see that Goldstein and Conrad (1990) and Patthey-Chavez and Ferris (1997) claim that it is the more proficient learners who engage in longer exchanges with their teachers. However, Doreen (2009) believes that the frameworks of negotiation and scaffolding both predict that less proficient learners will benefit from such assistance. It is, thus, important to analyze the talk of less proficient high school second language learners.
1.4.2 The domestic researches into the effects of negotiation on writing teaching
In China, where language teaching is characterized with large classes, negotiation, an effective combination of traditional teacher assessment and peer assessment, is one of the solutions to the deficiency of the traditional writing assessment method (Yang 2008). However, Yang (2008) points out that the Chinese EFL writing course is typically teacher-centered in assessment with little negotiation between the teacher and students or among students themselves. The researchers in China start researches on negotiation in recent years. The research focus is still on the review of existing researches on negotiation abroad and the researchers just present a number of viewpoints. Little empirical study of the Chinese EFL writing exists. Zhang (2006) and Yang (2008) explore the impact of negotiation on the Chinese university's students EFL writing evaluation of writing, modifying composition, writing ability and the attitude of the students on the negotiations based on Schmidt's attention by using group negotiation. The results show that: the students can give more volume, more general features to the commentary; the students have improved their writing scores significantly; students have a positive attitude toward negotiation. He suggests that the future research could be done on different levels of language learners to test the effectiveness of negotiation on writing. Dong (2011) investigates the impact of negotiation on high school EFL learners’ English basic writing development based on the process-oriented writing and scaffolding by using a combination of the teacher-student negotiation and group negotiation. She finds that Negotiation helps students to improve their writing scores and that the training of negotiation helps students to develop positive attitudes toward assessment activities.
1.5 Limitations of empirical studies on negotiation to date
The above review of major studies on negotiation in writing teaching make it widely accepted that negotiation has proved to be able to facilitate leaner's writing through providing opportunities to obtain comprehensible input, receive feedback, be pushed to make modification in output, and test learner's hypothesis. But there still exists some limitations in negotiation in writing teaching researches so far:
1. Most of the studies focus on one particular type of negotiation. Very few of them made attempts to combine three negotiation types into one research paradigm and examine their respective effects on L2 writing. Negotiation of content receives the least attention so far.
2. There are few empirical studies on negotiation in EFL writing teaching in China.
The above researchers have proved that negotiation can improve the Chinese university students’ EFL writing ability and Zhang (2006) suggests that the future research could be done on different levels of language learners to test the effectiveness of negotiation on writing. Doreen (2009) also claims that the frameworks of negotiation and scaffolding both predict that less proficient learners will benefit from such assistance because a rather narrow learner population type, high-proficiency matriculated English learners, has been investigated thus far. She finds that the interface of negotiation and scaffolding indicates that conferences which focus almost entirely on content and rhetorical issues promote more learner participation even with pre-matriculated L2 adult learners with limited experience in English academic writing. What is more, there are few empirical studies on negotiation in EFL writing teaching in China. Therefore, the researcher intends to explore the impact of negotiation on the Chinese high school students’ English writing scores by using group negotiation.
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