A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Negotiations With Different Task Supports

This thesis reports a study on the effect of conversations with varying degrees of"task support"on the use of negotiations by Chinese EFL learners. The main questions addressed are: 1) What are the types of negotiations used by the Chinese EFL learners in their conversations? 2) What is the effect of the tasks with different degrees of"task support"on the learners'use of negotiations? 3) What is the effect of task order on the choice of negotiation types in the learners'conversations?The subjects involved in this study were selected from 44 students, majoring in English as a foreign language, who were labeled as learners of low oral proficiency on the basis of the results obtained from the OPI. The subjects were divided randomly into two groups of 11 pairs, who were required to accomplish the tasks of conversations with different degrees of"task support"in different ordering, which was operationally defined in the study as the amount of linguistic information inherent in the task design as well as the requirement created by the task for a sequential solution process. All the pairs'conversations were recorded, transcribed and typed. The conceptual classification of negotiations was based on Ilonca M.H. and Joyce L.M (2004). The data analysis generated the following major findings:Firstly, 13 types of negotiations were identified in the conversational production across the two groups: information questions, clarification requests, agreement questions, opinion questions, confirmation checks, other questions, agreements, disagreements, affirmations, corrections, repairs, clarifications and socially distributed productions.Secondly, the independent sample T-test analysis reveals that there is no significant difference in the learners'use of negotiations between the two conditions of high or low degree of task support, suggesting that the amount of task support does not produce any obvious effect on the use of negotiations. However, significant difference was found in the use of agreement and agreement questions between high and low task support, indicating that the conversationalists proposed agreement questions and used more responses of agreement as communicative strategies because little linguistic information inherent in the tasks of low support was provided for them to keep the conversation going on. Excessive use of agreement is likely to be related to the low oral proficiency level shared by the subjects.Thirdly, in the case of task order, in which each group were asked to finish their talk in the order of high degree of task support followed by the low degree or vice versa, there is no significant difference in the learners'use of negotiations between the two conditions of task order. Therefore, the sequence of the tasks with different amount of task support does not produce an obvious effect on the learners'use of negotiations. Interestingly, significant difference was found in the use of clarification requests and repairs between the two types of sequence of the tasks, that is, in the sequence from high to low in the amount of task support the learners used the negotiations of clarification requests and repairs. One possible explanation is that the speakers were trying to walk out of the confusions in face of a huge amount of information provided, either implicitly or explicitly, in the task.The findings from this study may have some pedagogical implications. L2 teachers do not have to make special effort designing tasks for the low level learners with varying degree of task support to facilitate negotiations. Such a special group of learners should be treated as language learning beginners, for whom stratified instructions always do work. Oral tasks, therefore, should be designed for this group of learners with caution. Further research could be made into the high-level learners who are likely to benefit from such a type of task design in question.