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Facilitating negotiated interaction 123
ers (turns 24 – 26). It is unfortunate because, this being a “Speaking” class, had her topic management been a little more flexible, it would have allowed the students to continue to speak on the topics that interested them, and thus offered more opportunities for them to improve their conversational skills. Flexible topic control is so vital for promoting negotiated interaction that Ellis (1999, p. 251) sees it “as a far more important construct than meaning negotiation where language teaching is concerned.”
Before closing this section, a cautionary note is in order. The emphasis on talk and topic management, however important it is, should not blind us to believe that only those students who initiate talk and topic in the classroom succeed in learning the target lan- guage. We know from the Slimani study that learners claim to have learned from the talk and topic initiated by their peers, even if they themselves have not participated. More interestingly, Slimani found that even those students who did not rank highly their classmates’ contribution as a productive source of linguistic input profited from it unknowingly.
The Slimani finding, which is supported by experiential knowl- edge as well, is crucial because, while there are always some learn- ers in every class who love to talk, there are also some who keep quiet because they may find speaking in their still-developing L2 very stressful. High anxiety resulting from a stressful situation may, as Krashen has cautioned us, slow the ability to process input. It is possible that “the learners who maintain silence may experience less anxiety and so be better able to ‘let in’ the input their fellow stu- dents have secured for them” (Ellis, 1999, p. 246).
Microstrategies for Facilitating Negotiated Interaction
Let us now turn to the kind of microstrategies that are likely to help the practicing teacher facilitate negotiated interaction in the class- room. The four interactional episodes included in this chapter and the discussion that followed each one indicate the need for teachers to engage the learners in all three dimensions of negotiated inter- action: textual, interpersonal, and ideational. Therefore, as indicated earlier, microstrategies for facilitating negotiated interaction must be designed in such a way as to provide opportunities for learners to stretch their linguistic repertoire, sharpen their conversational