Article Response 1
Shen WANG
Open summary:
The paper “Non-native/ Non-native Conversation: A Model for Negotiation of Meaning”
investigates the conversational interaction between native speakers (NS) and non-native
speakers (NNS), especially focusing on the conversations among non-native speakers.
Through analyzing the sources of conversations between NS/NS, NS/NNS and NNS/NNS, the
author found that the shared background, linguistic and other related information among
interlocutors facilitate the communication and proposed a model to deal with the
negotiation of meaning in NNS-NNS discourse. Besides, the negotiation of meaning occur
more frequent in NNS-NNS conversations than that involving native speakers. Finally, the
author suggested the importance of NNS-NNS interactions and the function of negotiation
of meaning in second language acquisition process.
Critique:
Introduction and Literature review
For the introduction part, the author has clearly identified the major issue of this paper that
is to investigate how the conversation between non-native speakers is different from that
between native speakers and between native speakers and non-native speakers. In this part,
the author also indicated that the rationale of this study is to compare the discourses of
NNS-NNS with that of NS-NS and NS-NNS.
The introduction part firstly introduces the background of the interactions of NS-NNS and
then presents the major issue of this paper. Then, the author discussed the self-correction
and other-correction in the past studies and illustrated the disagreements towards past
studies. The author extended the ideas in past hypothesis and concluded “NNS-NNS
discourse allows greater opportunity than NS-NNS or NS-NS discourse for the negotiation of
meaning.” (Varonis & Gass, 1985) After that, the structure and the aim of the research have
been presented, followed by the significance of this paper to indicate the underlying issues,
“involved in a native speaker's use of foreigner talk is the comprehensibility of the input
from the non-native speaker.” (Varonis & Gass, 1985)
As for the literature review part, I think this paper does not include a separate section of
literature review. The literature review is included in “introduction”. In introduction part,
there are some findings in the past studies, like Long’s study. The author extended and
challenged the findings in the past studies to present the purpose or the significance of this
paper.
As far as I am concerned, the literature review included in some other parts of the paper
could do help to make a tighter connection between the literature reviewed and the ideas of
the study, which is also useful to make some ideas in the paper more reliable due to the
theoretical supports of the past studies, and on the other hand, it could make the paper
brief. Sometimes, the word limit is very important for the published paper, therefore, being
brief is an essential principle in academic paper.
Methods and research design
For this part, the author used “data base” as the title to clearly introduce the study reported
on in this paper coming for three sources (the conversational dyads between NS-NS, NS-NNS
and NNS-NNS), in which the NS-NS and NNS-NNS pairs served as the control groups. The
participants of this paper are students at the English Language Institute of The University of
Michigan, whose native languages are Spanish or Japanese. They had not met each other
before. Each informal conversation was audio-taped.
The participants of this study have been clearly presented; however, some detailed
information about the conversational dyads has not been illustrated, such as the concrete
topics of each conversation and the time span of the conversational dyads. The factors, like
the topics, the age, the personalities and other related sources, all could affect the results of
the study. Therefore, I think some detailed information about the conversations should be
included to make the paper more reliable. Besides, the process of analyzing the sources has
not been described. We could only deduce that the results are found through analyzing the
function of the sentences in the conversations.
Findings and Discussion
Based on the literature reviewed theories, the author firstly concluded the two functions of
the non-understanding routines: negotiation of meaning and/or continuation of the
conversation. Then the basic model for non-understanding had been established in the form
of chart, followed by the extended model of negotiation of meaning in a NNS-NNS
conversation and the conversational continuants, based on the analysis of the excerpts of
the sentences in NNS-NNS conversations.
In the results and discussion part, the author used concrete data (the value of sd, t, p, etc.)
in statistics to gain the findings: (1) NNS-NNS conversations show the greatest incidence of
the non-understanding routines (negotiation of the meaning); (2) the greater the degree of
difference which exists in the backgrounds of the conversational participants, the greater the
amount of negotiation in the conversation between two non-native speakers. The findings
are reliable based on the concise data and clearly address the major issue of this paper to
compare the difference between NNS-NNS dialogues and NS-NNS or NS-NS dialogues.
The participants are treated relatively ethically, because the data or the excerpts of the
dialogues are anonymous. However, I do not know whether the participants consented to
participate in the investigation or not. Besides, I consider that the voice of the researcher is
dominant. I hope to hear more from the participants, which would make the results more
authentic.
Conclusion
The conclusion part highlights the key issue of this paper that is to deal with negotiations of
meaning in NNS-NNS conversations and compare them to similar negotiations in NS-NNS
and NS-NS dialogues. The conclusion part summarizes the two main findings: (1) “a model to
deal with negotiation of meaning in NNS-NNS discourse and a model which provides a
means for dealing with the complexities of negotiation” (2) “negotiations of meaning occur
with greater frequency in NNS-NNS dyads than in dyads that include native speakers.”
(Varonis & Gass, 1985) And some limitations that different kinds of discourse situation and
other factors may also affect the results of the research have been presented in this paper.
Therefore, the author identified the avenues for future research to deal with the issues
about other important sociolinguistic variables of the discourses. In my view, the
personalities, needs, sex, age, background of the participants, the topic of the discourse and
other related factors could make the results of this research inaccurate, thus it is very
essential to deal with these sociolinguistic variables in the future research to make the
results more reliable.
My reflection:
This paper inspires me to think about the function of “negotiation of meaning” in ESL classes
and the methods of teaching “negotiation of meaning” in ESL classes. As for the function of
“negotiation of meaning” in L2 classes, I think it can help teachers to clarify the ideas in class
and facilitate inquire-based teaching. Besides, it is also a method to facilitate the
communication in L2 classrooms, because “negotiation of meaning” can serve as a role of
conversational continuants. AS for the methods to teach “negotiation of meaning” strategy
in ESL classrooms, I think L2 teacher could use video to present the dialogues of NNS-NNS
and select some excerpts to analyze and propose the “model” to students. After that,
teacher could let students to do role play to apply the “model” in their real conversations.
Reference:
Varonis, E., & Gass, S. (1985). Non-native/non-native conversations: A model for negotiation of
meaning.” Applied Linguistics, 6, 71–90. (re: negotiation of meaning)