Importance Of Negotiation In Communication

Negotiation will take place if there is a breakdown in communication which the interlocutors attempt to solve. In a conversation, if one of the participant says something that the other part do not understand , then the participants will help the interaction to advance using various communicative strategies. These strategies used when negotiating meaning may include requests for clarification, repair of speech or paraphrase…

Gass (2002) stated that in a conversation between learners, this negotiation will result in the provision of direct or indirect form of feedback, including recast, clarification requests , repetition… this feedback will attract the learners attention to the mismatch between the input and the learners’ output (p175).

Interaction

In the process of negotiation learners will pay attention to incomprehensible utterances and they will try to produce output. There are two types of negociation:

1-Negotiation of meaning in which interlocutors participate in the clarification of concepts, words in order to make it clearer. This type of interaction can occur in the classroom between teacher – learner and

2- Avoidance and ignorance, lack of knowledge leads to the use of an L1 elements then creating L1 interference, avoidance oocurs when the learners avoid the use of an item because they do not know it neither in L1 nor in the TL.

3- Communication strategy-based errors using equivalent forms, synonyms or antonyms instead of the unknown TL form.

4- Intralingual errors, it happens when learners do not know a TL item, therefore an example can be overgeneralization of a rule.

5- Compound and ambigous errors, these errors are attributed to more than one cause. Ambiguous errors occur when there are two possible diagnoses of errors and one can not decide on the true cause.

6- Induced errors, they are caused by classroom situations. Learners get confused and misled by the way teachers introduce definitions, explanations and examples.

The question raised here is whether teachers can prevent errors from occurring. For instance the main source that can be controlled by teachers is errors introduced by teaching methodology and materials. In this context Corder (1981) claimed that “if we attempt to teach a learner something before he is ready for it, the result will be confusion, false hypotheses, and what we could call redundant errors” (p 58). Therefore teachers should take into consideration their learners’interlanguage