Negotiation of meaning refers to the interactional work conversational partners do to overcome communication breakdowns, namely the modifications and adjustments that occur when a message is not immediately understood. Long (1983, 1996) and Pica (1994) established it as a central mechanism in SLA, arguing that negotiation makes input comprehensible not through pre-simplification but through real-time collaborative repair.
| Strategy | Function | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmation check | Verify understanding of interlocutor's utterance | "You mean the blue one?" |
| Clarification request | Signal non-understanding | "Sorry, what do you mean?" |
| Comprehension check | Verify the listener has understood | "Do you follow?" |
| Repetition | Repeat part or all of utterance | "The third floor?" |
These strategies trigger interactionally modified input, which research suggests is more beneficial for acquisition than pre-modified (simplified) input, because the learner actively participates in making the input comprehensible (Pica, 1994; Long, 1996).
Negotiation does more than fix communication problems. It creates conditions that connect input, internal learner capacities, and output (Long, 1996):
This is why TBLT prioritizes tasks that create genuine information gaps: they generate the conditions for negotiation that a teacher-fronted PPP lesson typically does not.