Negotiation of Meaning
Negotiation of meaning refers to the interactional work conversational partners do to overcome communication breakdowns — 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.
Negotiation Strategies
| 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).
Why Negotiation Promotes Acquisition
Negotiation does more than fix communication problems. It creates conditions that connect input, internal learner capacities, and output (Long, 1996):
- Draws attention to form — breakdowns highlight mismatches between learner language and target norms, promoting noticing
- Provides negative evidence — signals that the learner's utterance was problematic
- Pushes modified output — the learner must reformulate, engaging in pushed output
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.
References
- Long, M.H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W.C. Ritchie & T.K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Academic Press.
- Pica, T. (1994). Research on negotiation: What does it reveal about second-language learning conditions, processes, and outcomes? Language Learning, 44(3), 493–527.