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Facilitating negotiated interaction 115
personal and ideational—aspects of classroom discourse (see also, Kumaravadivelu, 1999b). As we have seen, interaction as a textual activity emphasizes formal concepts, interaction as an interper- sonal activity emphasizes conversational signals, and interaction as an ideational activity emphasizes propositional content. Together, these three dimensions provide opportunities for teachers to create a conducive atmosphere in which learners can stretch their linguistic repertoire, sharpen their conversational capacities, and share their individual experiences.
If our objective, as it should be, is to engage our learners in a process of participation that puts a premium on their personal knowledge gained from their lived experience, then we need to re- define the concept of negotiated interaction. Moving beyond the narrow confines of conversational adjustments such as compre- hension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification requests, the concept of negotiated interaction has to be extended to include the propositional content as well as the procedural conduct of par- ticipatory discourse. In other words, it has to include the creation of opportunities for the learners to share their own individual per- spectives on issues that matter to them, and to share in a way that makes sense to them.
In more practical terms, this means that teachers should seek to promote negotiated interaction by yielding to the learners a reasonable degree of control over what Allwright (1981) has called the management of learning. In the specific context of promoting negotiated interaction, management of learning consists chiefly of talk management and topic management. The former may be said to refer to the management of how participants talk, and the latter to the management of what they talk about.
Talk Management
Talk management is concerned with how participants conduct their classroom conversation in order to accomplish their immediate ed- ucational goals. It represents what van Lier (1988) has called the “activity” of classroom discourse. The way in which talk is con- trolled and managed will be determined, to a large extent, by the structure of information exchange, or, simply, by the type of ques- tions asked and the type of responses given. The structure of infor- mation exchange in most language classes usually signals what is