A Classroom View of Negotiation of Meaning with EFL Adult Mexican Pupils

Abstract

The present article reports on an approximate replication of D. Foster’s (1998) study on the negotiation of meaning. D. Foster investigated the interactional adjustments produced by L2 English learners working on different types of language learning tasks in a classroom setting. This replication study duplicates the methods of data collection and data analysis of the original study, but alters the conditions by exploring interactional modifications in the language production of English as a foreign language (EFL) students. It followed the three parameters set originally by D. Foster: speech production, comprehensible input, and modified output. It was thus carried out within the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP). The participants’ differences were seen as affecting the results of this replication where a corpus shows participants conducting significant amounts of meaning negotiation and producing modified output. This disparity in results is interpreted as deriving from a closer examination of interaction as suggested by Pica, Holliday, Lewis, and Morgenthaler.