A Study On The Characteristics Of Online One-to-One Negotiated Interaction Between Native English Speakers And Non-Native English Speakers

Interaction provides a meaningful language environment for the use of interlanguage and is the source of the development of the interlanguage system.Face-to-face interaction has been carried out by most previous studies.The present study aims to investigate the usage of negotiation types and devices of online one-to-one negotiated interaction between native and non-native English speakers and its effect on non-native English speakers’ immediate oral output.The participants in the current study are ten non-native English speakers and five native English speakers aged from 19 to 23.It took them approximately 40 minutes to communicate in an online one-to-one mode once a week.They took part in this interaction process for eleven weeks.All the interactions were recorded via an online communication application,a total of 110 audio recordings.The corpus of ten recordings,selected one audio recording from each non-native English speaker,which was collected,transcribed,and analyzed.Under the guidance of three theories,including the Interaction Hypothesis,Sociocognitive Theory,and Output Hypothesis,the current research made a quantitative and qualitative analysis from the view of discourse negotiation.Three research questions will be addressed: 1)What negotiation types occur in the online one-to-one pattern? And how are they distributed? 2)What negotiation devices are employed by native and non-native English speakers to initiate and sustain the negotiated interaction? 3)How effective are various negotiation types and devices in promoting non-native English speakers’ immediate oral output?The study finds: 1)Among the three negotiation types,negotiation of content,enriching the content in interaction,was employed most frequently.Negotiation of meaning,resolving communication breakdowns,was ranked second.Negotiation of form,focusing on language form problems,was used least.2)Native English speakers initiated about 60% of the negotiated interaction.Among the six negotiation devices,clarification requests,recasts,and confirmation checks were applied most.It indicated that interaction in the online one-to-one pattern could promote language use opportunities for non-native English speakers.Meanwhile,about 40% was initiated by non-native English speakers,and clarification requests,confirmation checks,and explicit help occurred most frequently.It demonstrated that non-native English speakers were active in the negotiation process.3)On the whole,negotiation of content was more effective in eliciting non-native English speakers’ immediate oral production than the other two negotiation types.Among all the six negotiation devices applied by native English speakers,clarification requests,confirmation checks,and explicit help were better than the other three devices in promoting the quality and quantity of non-native English speakers’ oral output with greater sentence length and syntactic complexity.Moreover,online ono-to-one negotiated interaction had a variety of interactional features like text chat,and then the negotiation process was diverse.With such a situation,negotiated interaction could proceed successfully.Online one-to-one negotiated interaction between native and non-native English speakers,a unique interaction mode,has its particularity.Due to the asymmetry in language ability,cultural background,and way of thinking,the interaction strategies employed in this interaction mode are different from other interaction modes.This online one-to-one interaction is complementarity to face-to-face interaction.The present study has potential value in improving the research on interaction strategies and interaction modes.