Negotiation of Meaning in Inte
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NEGOTIATION OF MEANING IN INTERLANGUAGE TALK by Friederike A. Tegge A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida April 2004 NEGOTIATION OF MEANING IN INTERLANGUAGE TALK by Friederike A. Tegge This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate' s advisor , Dr. DuBravac, Department of Languages and Linguistics, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee . It was submitted to the faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE : of Arts & Letters Studies ii ABSTRACT Author: Friederike A. Tegge Title Negotiation of Meaning in Interlanguage Talk Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. DuBravac Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2004 This small-scale study investigated the extent to which negotiations of meaning during methodologically focused communicative partner- activities were concerned with a grammatical target structure, the dative case following spatial prepositions in German. In addition, the impact of the negotiation of the target structure on subsequent learner performance was investigated. The subjects, beginning-level students of German, participated in two two-way information-gap activities, preceded and followed by the same grammaticality judgment test. The interaction was audiotaped and transcribed. The improvement in accuracy between the pretest and the posttest was calculated and correlated with the number of negotiation moves. The results indicate that the subjects negotiated meaning, including form, frequently . However, no significant change in the subjects' subsequent performance was observed. lll TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Table ........................................... vii List of Figures .......................................... ix Negotiation of Meaning in Interlanguage Talk ............. 1 Negotiation of Meaning .............................. 7 Negotiation of Meaning and Interlanguage Talk ................... .... 11 Grammar in Negotiation of Meaning ........ 14 The Merits of Negotiation of Meaning ..... 16 Negotiation of Meaning: An Overview ................ 18 Interaction as the Means and not the End of Acquisition ................... 20 The Issue of Comprehensible Input ........ 22 Michael Long's Interaction Hypothesis .... 27 Negotiation of Meaning and Comprehensible Output .................... 29 The Structure of Negotiation of Meaning .. 32 Feedback and Negative Evidence ........... 32 iv Negotiation of Meaning and Information Processing ................................ 33 Consciousness-Raising and Input Enhancement . .............................. 3 4 The Present Study in the Context of Research on Negotiation of Meaning .... 35 Method ................................................... 35 Research Questions . ................................. 35 Participants ....... ................................. 36 Materials .......................................... 37 Design and Procedure ................................ 37 Data Analysis . ...................................... 41 Results .................................................. 48 Discussion .............. ................................ 51 References ............................................... 57 v APPENDIX Appendix A: Grammaticality Judgment Test ................. 62 Appendix B: Experimental Activities ...................... 67 Appendix C: Excerpts from the Transcribed Data ........... 73 vi TABLES Table 1: A Communicative Task ........................... 7 Table 2: Conversational Adjustments .................... 11 Table 3: GROUP A: Number of Correct Answers in the Pre- and Posttest ......................... 41 Table 4: Group B: Number of Correct Answers in the Pre- and Posttest ............................. 42 Table 5: Groups A and B: Number of Correct Answers in the Pre- and Posttest ...................... 42 Table 6: Group A: Number of Interactional Units ........ 46 Table 7: Group B: Number of Interactional Units .... ... 47 Table 8: Number of Units for Group A and Group B ....... 47 Table 9: Percentages of Negotiations in All Units ...... 47 Table 10: Percentages of Negotiations Addressing Form in All Negotiations ...................... 48 Table A1: Grammaticality Judgment Test .................. 62 Table A2: Task 1: Instructions .......................... 67 Table A3: Task 1: Crime Scene and Objects ............... 68 Table A4: Task 1: Worksheet A ........................... 69 Table AS: Task 1: Worksheet B ................. ... .. 7 0 vii Table A6: Task 2: Worksheet A ........................... 71 Table A7: Task 2: Worksheet B ........................... 72 Table AS: Transcripts of Negotiations of Meaning Addressing Other Linguistic Features than Form ..................................... 73 Table A9: Transcripts of Negotiations of Meaning Addressing Form ............................... 74 Table AlO: Transcripts of Negotiations of Meaning Addressing the Target Structure ............... 75 viii FIGURES Figure 1: Correlation between Test Improvement and Total Negotiations ........................ 50 Figure 2: Correlation between Test Improvement and Dative-Negotiations ....................... 51 i x Negotiation of Meaning in Interlanguage Talk This study deals with negotiation of meaning in interlanguage talk with a specific focus on grammatical form. Negotiation of meaning is defined by Ellis (1994) as "the collaborative work which speakers undertake to achieve mutual understanding" (p. 260). It occurs during interaction between speakers when an actual or potential breakdown of communication is perceived and is intended to prevent or repair such disruption of conversation. In the field of second language acquisition (SLA) many researchers are exclusively concerned with interaction that includes at least one non-native speaker (NNS), i.e. a second or foreign language learner, except when interaction among native speakers (NSs) is used as control data. Pica, Lincoln-Porter, Paninos & Linnell (1996) give an accurate description: Negotiation between learners and interlocutors takes place during the course of their interaction when either one signals with questions or comments that the other's preceding message has not been successfully conveyed. (p. 61) Long (1980, 1983) coined the term "discourse modification", which has now come to be known as negotiation of meaning and first provided the following now widely accepted types of strategies for negotiation of meaning: comprehension check (Do 1 you understand?), clarification request (What was that? Sorry?), confirmation request (Do you mean "Kirche"?), and self- and other-repetition (see also Gass & Selinker, 2001, for an introduction) Negotiation of meaning occurs during conversations among all pairs of interlocutors (NS-NS, NS-NNS, NNS-NNS), due to the fact that they all need to deal with breakdowns of communication. As the title implies, this study focuses on negotiation of meaning in a very specific setting, that is, negotiation of meaning in interlanguage talk. The term interlanguage, coined by Selinker (1972), refers to the developing grammatical system in a learner's mind. This system consists of correct and incorrect rules and hypotheses about the target language as well as transfer from their first language, and, therefore, differs from the target language structure. Interlanguage talk, thus, refers to discourse among non-native speakers (Ellis, 1994) Since the NNSs' grammatical system is "imperfect" or non target-like, it has been argued that interlanguage talk does not aid language acquisition or, more extreme, that it is detrimental to language learning. The latter has been disproved (Ellis, 1994, p. 266). On the basis of the existing research on interlanguage talk (Varonis & Gass, 1985,among others), it has been widely accepted that interlanguage talk provides valuable learning opportunities. This acceptance can be seen in the Communicative Approach, the current trend of language teaching, which makes great use of communicative 2 partner- and small-group activities (Littlewood, 1981; Omaggio Hadley, 2001). The term "negotiation of meaning" to a person less familiar with the field might imply a focus on semantic meaning or on lexis. However, negotiation of meaning can be concerned with various linguistic features, including lexis, phonology, or grammatical structure. Form creates meaning, in other words, grammar play s an important part in creating a meaningful utterance . A great number of studies on negotiation of meaning hav e a rather vague task design, in the sense that the tasks do not encourage or require the use and negotiation of specific morphosyntactic features (Pica, 1994; Pica, 1996; Varonis & Gass, 1985; Pica, 1988; Pica et alt., 1996; ). Varonis & Gass (1985 ) , for example, ask the subjects to "introduce [themselves) and find out about each other" (p. 72). Pica (1988) described that the "topics [of the NS-NNS conversations) ranged from matters pertinent to the NS's paper, to those more personal to the NNSs such as their family and friends, previous education, and future plans" (p . 48) Pica et alt. (1996 ) worked with jigsaw tasks that had no specific grammatical focus . Other studies are designed with a greater focus on specific forms, such as Ellis & Nobuyoshi (1993 ) , who studied the negotiation of past tense