Feature Article
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individuals or small groups) as defined by Troike (2006), to examine English language learners’ use of negotiation of meaning within their assigned classroom activities in order to identify 1) what NOM strategies are employed by the learner; 2) how the teacher employs and/or explicitly teaches NOM strategies; and 3) which NOM strategies are prevalently used among the learners.
Methodology
The eleven participants of this study were adult ESL learners studying in a graduate study preparatory reading course within an English Language Program (ELP) located at a private university in northwest Ohio. This course was a 3-credit prerequisite for admission to their chosen field of study.The demographic breakdown of the participants is as follows: seven were from India, two were from China, one was from Saudi Arabia, and one was from Japan.The reading class met three times a week. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the class met for 50 minutes, and on Fridays they met for one hour and forty minutes.The teacher of record for this class was a native English speaker with a master’s degree in TESOL. To elicit the kinds of strategies learners used in negotiation of meaning, three instruments were employed in this study: 1) lesson plans, 2) observations with lesson notes, and 3) audio-visual recordings with an observation strategy checklist. Each instrument is described below. Lesson plans created by the instructor of record for the course were collected. The program advocated a 5-stage lesson plan with warm up, mini-lesson, guided practice, independent practice and closing. In general, these lesson plans matched the course content as outlined by the program’s curriculum and syllabus given to the teacher. Lesson plans were collected to determine what kinds of learning activities were planned and which of these activities required negotiation of meaning so that they could be audio-visually recorded. Classroom observations were conducted by the researcher, who was also the assigned teaching assistant for the course. The observational notes are unstructured notes that illustrate planned and unplanned events in the teacher’s instruction and within the tasks assigned. These notes informed Volume 24
No. 2
June 2016
ethnographic detail and increased the researcher’s understanding of the classroom practices and the types of strategies that were being employed by the teacher and students within the class. Audio-visual recording were chosen to collect information on group interaction. It was chosen above audio-only recordings in order to capture non-verbal communication and other constructed artifacts used within the process of negotiation.
Procedure
To mitigate the researcher paradox and to allow for a more emic approach, the researcher was assigned as a student teacher/teaching assistant to the reading course that participated in this study, as part of the MA TESOL mentorship program. The mentorship program at this institution has been designed to give second-year MA TESOL students direct experience in the classroom as a student teacher/teaching assistant within the ELP. As per program requirements, the researcher attended every class three times a week for sixteen weeks. For the first half of the semester, he participated in the classroom in order to familiarize himself with the content and the students. As a student teacher in the classroom, he had the following responsibilities: 1) to walk around the classroom in order to observe and provide assistance to the learners; 2) to monitor the learners during activities in order to support their efforts; and 3) to collaborate with the primary teacher to create lesson plans and design appropriate activities to increase the opportunity for students to implement NOM during the activities. During the seventh week, consent forms were distributed, and by the ninth week the researcher began to record class interaction of group work, using a video camera over the course of five consecutive lessons. Using the lesson plans and observation lesson notes, the recorded lessons were time-indexed and annotated for points of interaction where NOM strategies were used. These activities were then transcribed and coded. The coding was adapted from eight strategies found consistently in the literature. These are clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, recasts, self-repetitions, other-repetitions, self-repairs, and implicit correction strategies (Ellis, 2008; Long, 1983; Oliver, 1998). Four more strategies (initiating questions, TESOL Arabia Perspectives
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