Meaning Negotiation

A significant share of classroom interaction occurs between teachers and language learners. Therefore, the individual characteristics of teachers could play facilitative or impeding roles thus encouraging or discouraging learners from getting engaged in interaction and meaning negotiation attempts when interacting with their teachers. Surprisingly however, this area has attracted scant attention. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring students’ perceptions of their teachers’ socio-communicative style and nonverbal immediacy in relation to their engagement in classroom teacher-learner interaction and frequency of meaning negotiation attempts in their interactions. To this aim, 72 students were randomly assigned to six classes of 12 taught by six teachers. Richmond, McCroskey and Johnson’s (2003) nonverbal immediacy scale and McCroskey and Richmond’s (1996) socio-communicative style scale were administered to students to tap into their perceptions of these two qualities of their teachers. Then the total amount of time the students were engaged in active interaction with the teachers and the number of meaning negotiation attempts employed by them were computed. The results of Correlations and Regression Analyses revealed significant relationships between teacher nonverbal immediacy, the two dimensions of socio-communicative style (Assertiveness and Responsiveness) and the students’ willingness to engage in interaction and meaning negotiation with their teachers.

Nowadays, intercultural communication via email among various groups and societies has been increasingly important as an aspect of communication. This research aims at investigating aspects of politeness meaning negotiation via emails exchanged between English and Persian speakers with different cultural backgrounds. The present study also reveals the potentials for using emails to experience culture as a process of meaning negotiation. To do this, 18 English and Persian speakers (aged 22-60) were asked to exchange emails for 12 weeks. After collecting the required samples, the interplay between the computer-mediated communication, speech act and politeness is explored by using the analytical frameworks of Hyme’s ethnography of communication (1974), Searle’s speech act theory (1969) and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987). The methodology of this research is descriptive analytical. The results of this research show that “politeness” is not a stable construct. Rather it is constantly (re)negotiated by the interactants who take into account the relevant contextualization cues. In addition saving the face of the sender and the receiver is concerned simultaneously in the process of email exchanging.

This article reports on a study of interaction amid beginners with the use of the technological resource WhatsApp . Its major objective was to analyze online oral negotiated interaction characteristics, using mainly WhatsApp audio-recorded messages, but also multimodal interaction (text, images, GIFs, emoticons, etc.). It was a qualitative, interpretive, and exploratory case study applied to 33 participants from a public technical school in Brazil, in which participants were in the first year of High School. The analysis revealed that negotiated interaction was the main component of interaction, although in a different sense if related to the theoretical framework held in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Therefore, this study added a discussion on interaction in SLA, which considered the peculiarities of the online oral negotiated interaction among beginner learners of English using WhatsApp . The interpretive findings discussed in this article may enlighten pedagogical practices in SLA as well as broaden possibilities in terms of activities development to work on online oral interaction amongst beginners, with the aid of technological resources. Finally, this study may serve the purpose of promoting reflections on SLA theories about interaction.