Page 131 - Beyond Methods

Facilitating negotiated interaction 119
still-developing language capacity, and in the process enhance their learning potential. In a class where negotiated interaction hardly takes place, teachers would have answered their own questions or stopped with the first correct response from a student, thereby de- priving other learners of extended linguistic input and, more impor- tantly, robbing them of a chance to stretch their limited linguistic repertoire.
There was also some information exchange taking place in episode 5.3. As we discussed in Chapter 3, one way of ensuring ex- change of information is by asking referential questions that seek information and permit open-ended responses rather than asking display questions that allow teachers and learners to demonstrate their knowledge of the language only. The episode clearly shows that by asking referential questions, the teacher has succeeded in promoting negotiated interaction even in a class where the learners have very limited linguistic and communicative ability.
Employing referential questions can also become, like the use of the traditional IRF exchange structure, routinized and ritualized if no attention is paid to the actual meaning of what the learners are saying. As Scott Thornbury (1996, p. 282) points out, ritualized responses, even within a referential question-answer framework, “anchor the classroom discourse firmly in the traditional IRF camp, and suggest that ‘it doesn’t matter what you say so long as you pro- nounce it properly.’” Teachers are most likely to promote genuine negotiated interaction in class if they engage the learners on the merit of their message. In other words, they have to closely link their efficient talk management with effective topic management.
Topic Management
During the early stages of interactional studies, Hatch (1978) re- ported that giving the learners the freedom to nominate topics pro- vided an effective basis for interactional opportunities. A decade later, van Lier (1988, p. 153) stressed the importance of what he has called “topicalization,” a process by which “learners take up some- thing the teacher or another learner says and (attempt to) make it into next topic.” Experimental studies show several advantages to letting the learners have control over the topic: it can result (a) in the tailoring of the linguistic complexity of the input to the learner’s own level, (b) in the creation of better opportunities for negotiating