Page 142 - Beyond Methods

130 Facilitating negotiated interaction 5.2.6 Finally, in doing this exploratory project on topic management,
what have you learned about yourself as a teacher?
In Closing
This chapter on facilitating negotiated interaction focused on how teachers and learners manage classroom discourse, and how such management influences the very nature and scope of input, interac- tion, output, and, ultimately, L2 development. An underlying thread that runs through this chapter is the joint responsibility vested with both teachers and learners. Without the willing and active cooper- ation of all the participants, it would be almost impossible to create a conducive atmosphere in the classroom needed to promote nego- tiated interaction that involves textual, interpersonal, and ideational aspects of language use. Together, the detailed discussion on the macrostrategy for facilitating negotiated interaction, the sample in- teractional data, the illustrative microstrategies, and the exploratory projects indicate the challenges and opportunities practicing teach- ers face in helping their learners maximizing their learning potential.
Any attempt at facilitating negotiated interaction can yield de- sired results only if all the participants feel that they have flexibility and freedom to contribute to talk and topic management. In that sense, what is also involved here is the degree of autonomy given to the learner. In the next chapter, we turn to what it means to promote learner autonomy.