Our Choice, Our Say: Using Negotiation With Sophomores To Motivate Students' Participation In Oral Work

This paper describes a procedure for using negotiation to fully involve students in the classroom oral work. The procedure consists of a simple artifice that is based on the humanistic teaching theory, negotiation in the classroom encourages a shared sense of commitment to content, forms and results, giving motivation and substance to individual reflection by the learners and the teacher and improve learner autonomy for English learning.The paper records a one-term sustained oral work in the EFL classroom at Meizhou Jiaying University. The respondents are 36 English major sophomores. Data, collected in the form of observation, interviews and questionnaire before and after the experiment, were analyzed. This qualitative study examines the students' reactions to the initial plan for negotiation, the consequent tensions and difficulties faced by the teacher as well as the students and how negotiation became the preferred option for the students. The account shows how the humanistic negotiation became possible, and how the students got motivated to "open mouth" in the oral work of their own direction, took more responsibility for their own learning and learnt cooperatively with more autonomy. Results show that difficulties arose in the procedure were handled with and solved at different levesl through negotiation between teacher and students. Negotiation helps to consolidate the atmosphere of mutual trust and respect in the classroom, which set the students free of anxiety in speaking. Students' motive for participating in the oral work is boosted in such a DIY oral work. However, this method still failed to motivate some students to be active in the oral work. The researcher carried a tentative study on this too.