Effects of Negotiation on Language Learners' Output

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of various types of negotiation on learners' output. Three groups of 16 child learners of Dutch (NSs and NNSs) participated in the study, which asked them to orally describe a series of pictures to a partner in a communicative context. The results showed that the extent to which, and the ways in which, the participants interactionally modified their output during negotiations were determined by the type of negative feedback they received. The negotiations also had significant delayed effects: Performing the same communicative task with another partner in a posttest, the language learners who had been pushed in preceding negotiations produced a significantly greater quantity of output, provided more essential information, and displayed a greater range of vocabulary than language learners in a comparison group who had not been pushed. On the other hand, the negotiations had no significant effects on the syntactic complexity nor on the grammatical correctness of the learners' output during the posttest.