Teacher Feedback & Negotiation for Meaning
Julia M. KAWAMOTO
English Education Center, Institute for Education and Student Support, Ehime University

Abstract
This study investigates the use of negotiationand meaning-based) through the use of negotiation formeaning while interacting with their students in class.
Although, negotiation for meaning in second language

for meaning in the language classroom in Japaneseacquisition isuniversities. It focuses on whether or not teachers use

problems

negotiation for meaning or any type of modifying output

native language users, it is used in this study whenwith the use of form- and/or meaning-based feedback

teachers make requests for clariﬁcations so that students

and/or L1. The researcher found that even thoughwill notice their own linguistic problems and giveteachers were using motivational strategies to enticestudents a chance to correct their own errors and not

the students to talk during class lectures, there was agenerate from [sic] linguistic problems or communicationlack of providing form-feedback to improve on students

breakdowns

accuracy. This study discusses the use and type of

happen, the teacher-student interactions were analyzed,

negotiation interaction among the teachers/students inas well whether or not this interaction signiﬁcantly

the classroom.

impacted students output.

Introduction

Literature Review

In the ﬁeld of second language acquisition (SLA),

an attempt to overcome comprehension(Cook, 2015, p.15) between native and non-

(Cook, 2015, p.15). In order for this to

Feasibility Issue and Teachers Beliefs

providing form feedback (Lyster, Lightbown, & Spada,In her study, Kawamoto (2012) examined the feasibility

1999; Truscott, 1999) and using the L1 (Burden, 2001;

issue in terms of whether the teachers were able to

Cook, 2001) are controversial issues. However, many

integrate grammar and meaning in a communicatively

researchers, including the author, have found thatoriented instructional approach regardless of their native

providing form-feedback is eﬀective during interaction

language or their amount of teaching experience. She

between teacher and students in the classroom (Long,

compared experienced native-English speaking (NESTs)

2001, 2007; Spada & Lightbown, 1993). In practice, there

and non-native-English speaking teachers (NNESTs),

are methods for teachers to utilize so that learners areas well as experienced and inexperienced teachers,

given an opportunity to notice the feedback and continue

to determine how and to what extent these teachers

the use of the L2 in the classroom. Yet, according to

diﬀered in their ways of providing feedback. She foundSpada and Lightbown (2008), there has been very little

that when teachers were asked to correct any errors

research on the feasibility issue (Iwai & Kawamoto, 2011),

students make, teachers did not focus on a particularwhich is how and when form-focused instruction (i.e.,kind of error. However, teachers changed the way theyerror correction/error feedback) is most eﬀective in theprovided feedback when they were requested to pay

classroom. In addition, there are few studies of teacher-attention to a certain form or forms, in this case, verb

student interaction in terms of providing meaning-based

tense forms. The results indicated that the teachers had

feedback.

diﬃculty organizing and prioritizing their correction

The present study is an attempt to clarify thefeasibility issue when teachers provide feedback (form大学教育実践ジャーナル 第16号 2018of students

errors. As a result, it was concluded thatteachers have some diﬃculty in focusing on a speciﬁc9Julia M. KAWAMOTO

form naturally. This may be in part because of teachers

strategically make adjustment for students to overcome

beliefs and experiences that would influence their

the diﬃculties of their utterances and/or comprehension.

decision to implement a particular teaching approach and

The diagram below shows how communication

method.

breakdown is ameliorated during the negotiation process,beliefs are the foundations of teachers

as operationalized by Varonis and Gass (1985). This

teaching strategies (Doman, 2007; Farrell & Liam, 2005),

diagram (Fig. 1) will serve as a template for the present

and the teachers in the present study have diﬀerent

study to examine various strategies teachers use tobeliefs about their teaching and use of the L1 in the

repair communication breakdown through negotiatedclassroom, which will be mentioned in the discussion.

interaction.

Teachers

Teachers beliefs determine whether they emphasize or
ignore grammar instruction and/or how the L2 is taught.
For example, Mori (2002) found that the two NNESTs
in her study provided corrective feedback that wasconsistent with their beliefs. The ﬁrst teacherʼs beliefs
about classroom interaction reﬂected her philosophicaloutlook, according to which the world is structured interms of polar opposites, and were illustrated by using

Figure 1:
Diagram of the process of repairing communication
breakdown (Adapted from Varonis and Gass, 1985)

examples of grammar (e.g., past vs. present and singularvs. plural). She provided recasts, which involved theAccording to this model, (T) is the trigger inreformation of all or part of a studentʼs utterances,

the speakerʼs utterance which causes a listenerminus the error(Lyster & Ranta, 1997, p.46), as acomprehension problem. The listener uses an indicator

strategy to motivate students to continue their interaction[designated by (I)] to signal the speaker that a non-with her, and play a dual role of teacher and participant.

understanding occurred. This then stops the progress of

The second teacherʼs beliefs was more structured

the conversation and starts a downward progression, incompared to the ﬁrst teacher in which students need toturn, resulting in a pushdown eﬀect on the conversation.

learn sentence-bound rules (Mori, 2002, p.61). He gave

Response (R) is to give conﬁrmation that the speakerhis students opportunities to interact spontaneously as

recognizes that there is a non-understanding.

long as they stayed within the conﬁnes of the task he set

Reaction to the response (RR) is the reaction to theup to practice the grammar and vocabulary. Unlike his

misunderstanding, which is optional, and resolves thefemale counterpart who used recasts to camouﬂage her

negotiation or popping (a signal indicating that theintent when she provided feedback, the second teacher

conversation during the negotiation would return backtended to provide overt feedback, e.g., prompts (signaling

to the main ﬂow of the conversation). The following is andevices for students to modify their output) and explicit

example of repairing a communication breakdown:

feedback, for the students to be aware of their errors andon what grammar forms they were practicing.
In order to fully understand how teachers correct
students

errors or stimulate them to produce anappropriate utterance during meaningful communication,
investigation of negotiation for meaning is essential. We

Excerpt 1
1) Student: One grade members makes ah, one grade
members choose color. (T)2) Teacher: So the ﬁrst grade members choose thecolor? (I)can clarify its relation to language acquisition by using it3) Student: Choose color. (R)as a way to see how teachers and students interact.

4) Teacher: Really? (RR)

Negotiation for Meaning

By drawing on the above-mentioned background

Through negotiation, students not only have theresearch, the present study was conducted to determine

opportunity to communicate their meaning, but also

whether teachers are able to focus on a particular

to receive corrective feedback on their ill-formed

grammatical form or forms during meaningful interaction

utterances. In addition, when communication breakdown

in order to facilitate the students

occurs between teachers and students, teachers canTherefore, the following research questions were10

learning process.

大学教育実践ジャーナル 第16号 2018

Teacher Feedback & Negotiation for Meaning

formulated:

Data Coding

1. Were teachers able to merge both instructional focirespect to teacher utterance in terms of their use of L1(form- and meaning-based instruction)?

and providing form- and meaning-based feedback. The

The purpose of this question is to ﬁnd out if the teachers

researcher coded the data. For the form-based feedback,were able to focus on a form (verb tense), and whether

the categories were identiﬁed by the type of grammar

they could provide eﬃcient feedback on both form anderrors that the teacher corrected for the students. The

meaning at the same time.

meaning-based feedback in this study were coded by

2. Were there any NEST /NNEST diﬀerence?

devices teachers used to entice students to talk andThis question was intended to investigate potential

indicate understanding of their messages, which codes

contrasts between the NEST and NNEST (e.g., Chiba &were based on Dornyei and Scottʼs (1997), and Miller andMatsuura, 2003; Kawamoto & Iwai, 2008). In particular,

Kindtʼs (2008) taxonomies. These codes are deﬁned below:

The data from the class observations were coded with

it is assumed that the NEST would focus primarily
on meaning, and the NNEST would focus mainly on

Form-Based Feedback

grammatical form.

1. Prep ‒ Preposition
2. Lex ‒ Lexicon

Methods
Participants

3. V ‒ Verb tenses
4. Pron ‒ Pronunciation
5. Art ‒ Articles

The data collection for this study was conducted in
October and November 2014. The participants were

Meaning-Based Feedback

seven English language teachers in their communication/

1. R ‒ Repetition

conversational classes, which comprised university

2. Q ‒ Asking questions

students from four universities (one national, two

3. C ‒ Clariﬁcations (Oh you mean …?)

municipal, and one private) in diﬀerent majors and ﬁelds:

4. F ‒ Filling-in or ﬁnishing students comments

three female NNESTs, one female NEST, and three male

5. Con ‒ Conﬁrmation

NESTs. All teachers except one had more than ﬁve

6. Cont ‒ Getting students to continue

years of university teaching experience in Japan. For

7. P ‒ Praisingconvenience, the following pseudonyms are used:

8. A ‒ Getting students to ask questions
9. H ‒ Humor including sarcasm

1) Hana, Miki, and Yuki for the female NNESTs;

10. Com ‒ Comforting students (Youʼre doing OK.)

2) Sara for the female NEST;

11. Ht ‒ Hints

3) John, Nick, and Mike for the male NESTs.

12. Push ‒ Getting students to wake-up or do their

All participants have been fully informed about the

13. Call ‒ Calling out students name/group/pairclasswork
purpose, methods, and intended possible uses of thisresearch. In addition, the participants participated in avoluntary way. They also have given written consent.
Moreover, this study has been approved by the ethics
committee in Hiroshima City University.

Results
This section shows the results of the analysis of theteachers

feedback patterns. The results are organized

to answer the two research questions: merging form- andData Collection
Teachers used textbooks that were either assigned

meaning-based feedback (including the use of L1), anddiﬀerences between NESTs and NNESTs.

by their universities or chosen by the teachers as
appropriate for their students. Additional materials that

Research question 1

were used were created by the teachers. They were

Figures 2 and 3 below present summaries of thevideotaped in their own classrooms and were interviewed

number of times that teachers provided form- andafter their lessons, recorded by audio-taping.

meaning-based feedback in their classrooms.

大学教育実践ジャーナル 第16号 201811

Julia M. KAWAMOTO

below:
Excerpt 3
1) Student: MacDonald in uh Hiroshima Station. [Error:
preposition-teacher felt it was an error]
2) Teacher: Oh MacDonaldʼs at Hiroshima Station. Howlong did you work. So both days, weekend, both days?
Saturday and Sunday? [Feedback: recast-implicit]
3) Student: Both days. Ah . . . I work 8 hours.
Figure 2: Form-based feedback: number of occurrences
per category

We can see from the interactions above that there was a
nice balance for her students not only for them to notice
their errors easily, but also for them to manage theirlanguage problems without feeling forced to correct theirerrors (Mackey, 2007).
As for meaning-based feedback, all seven teachers
provided ways to get students talking during theteacher/student interaction. They tended to focus on
asking questions to students. Overall, the teachers had
the tendency to focus mainly on meaning-based feedback,rather than on the form-based type.
Here we can see that teachers diﬀer in terms of
their frequency of form- and meaning-based feedback intheir classes. This would imply that it is not simple for

Figure 3: Meaning-based feedback:number of occurrences per category

teachers, no matter how much teaching experience they
have, to restrict their attention to errors while engaging

As we can see in Figure 1, Hana is the only teacher out

a communicative language teaching approach.

of the seven who provided form-based feedback. The
three forms she concentrated on were prepositions,

Research question 2

lexicon, and pronunciation. In addition, this teacher used

Next, regarding the diﬀerences among the NEST/

only recasts; three out of her seven recasts were explicit

NNEST, the results presented in Figures 2 and 3 showin nature, as shown below in Excerpt 2:that there are no discernible group diﬀerences, but there
are individual diﬀerences. There are several notable

Excerpt 2

points that can be identiﬁed. First, regarding form-

1) Student: In Cocombia . . . [Error: pronunciation]

feedback, six teachers did not provide any grammatical

2) Teacher: In Colombia! Wow! Interesting country.

feedback at all, but apparently for diﬀerent reasons.

[Feedback: recast-explicit]
3) Student: Colombia.

One example is Miki who taught her lessons on
vocabulary and phrases in order for students to acquirecommunication strategies and meaning through the movie

From this a recast was triggered when the studentʼs

she used. Thus, her instruction was not concentrating onutterance contained an error. The teacher provided

the communicative and interactive aspects that the othera recast by reformulating the incorrect form into theteachers had emphasized.

correct form, which was then repeated by the student.

Second, in the case of meaning-based feedback, theThe rest of the time, the type of recasts that her

graph in Figure 3 shows that Yuki (244 times) has thestudents received were implicit; that is, they did nothighest number of counts, second is Sara (214), then Mikeinterrupt the communication flow between teacher(176). However, the types of meaning-based feedback

and student (Long, 2007) to ensure their message was

diﬀer amongst all the teachers. For example, Hana used

understood by the teacher (Doughty, 2001), as shown

diﬀerent means by calling the students

12

names (16),

大学教育実践ジャーナル 第16号 2018

Teacher Feedback & Negotiation for Meaning

praising them (17), asking questions (53), and repeating

In line 2, the teacher, Hana, attempted to understand theas an indication of understanding (21) to interact withstudentʼs gesture. The student responded by continuing

the students. These were ways for her to make them

the gesture and relying on her classmates to help her.

feel that the classroom was a safe environment. Miki

Finally, Hana understood the student was referring

primarily had to push her low-level unmotivated students

to a waitress serving the customer and continued onin order for them to work on the class activity by waking

the main topic. As we can see, an experienced teacher

them up (26), providing hints (32), encouraging them tosomewhat consistently used this motivational device tocontinue their writing (29), and praising them (12). Yuki

give students reasons for maintaining their attempt toasked questions in an attempt to draw students into acommunicate and negotiate.

discussion. Sara (158) mainly asked questions to elicit
some kind of response from her students. Similar to Sara,

Excerpt 5 gives a diﬀerent picture when Mike wasinteracting with his students.

John constantly asked questions (46) in some attempt
to get students interacting with him, whereas Nick (35)

Excerpt 5

used humor in order to emotionally comfort his students.

1) Student: Tanoshimu. (T)Finally, Mike would call out students names (67) to have2) Teacher: Ah, to look forward to it yes, yes so there

them answer the question from the textbook, and ask

you go yes enjoy thatʼs thatʼs those good ideas yes. (RR)a question to him (13). In addition, he constantly would

3) Teacher: Ah OK. Weʼll get, well thatʼs good over here.

praise them (34) whether or not their answers were

(Main topic)

correct. In summary, the answer to the second researchquestion indicates that all teachers were diﬀerent in their

Here in line 1, the student used Japanese since she did

approach to providing feedback. One reason may be thatnot know Tanoshimu in English. Mike gave the translation

the teachers working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974)

in line 2 and continued on the main topic (line 3). Thismay had been overloaded since they needed to constantly

type of negotiation is typical among the teachers since

shift between the students utterances, their assessment

the students rarely oﬀered to interact with their teachersof students performance, managing the class, and theirduring class time.

feedback decisions.

Pedagogical implications
Practical implications

Truscottʼs (1999) line of reasoning, that providing form

The teachers utilized both pushing down and popping up

feedback would impede learning, may be partially correctin order to repair communication breakdown to indicate

in cases where teachers could not provide eﬀective

to the students that their utterances needed to be

feedback. In addition, researchers (i.e., Krashen, 1981;

modiﬁed. In other words, students needed to be properly

Scott & Fuente, 2008) argue against the use of L1 andunderstood and to improve their accuracy. However, how

ﬁnd that by using it in the L2 classroom is potentiallythey pushed down and popped up the students errors were

detrimental to student learning in the EFL classroom

diﬀerent in terms of the way they negotiated during the(Carson, 2014, p.248). However, the researcher argues

interaction. For example, Excerpt 4 below is a sample

that feedback could be used eﬀectively and the useof a typical negotiated interaction using meaning-basedof L1 could reduce the gap between teachers

feedback between the teacher and student:

and students

beliefs

preferences. The researcher has somesuggestions of appropriate instruction that can be appliedin the classroom.

Excerpt 41) Student: No, ah, carry. <Student made a gesture>. (T)Empirical studies have shown evidence of situations

2) Teacher: Oh delivery. (I)where recasts could be used eﬀectively as feedback.

3) Student:

However, it may be diﬃcult for students to recognize

For the for the… <gesture, rely on otherstudents> (R)4) Teacher:

So you serve, serve. Just serve. Oh I see.

recasts as feedback (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997) since thelevel of readiness is important when using recasts. If(RR)

students have prior knowledge of the grammatical form

5) Teacher: So all day? (Main topic)

from earlier instruction or have metalinguistic awareness

大学教育実践ジャーナル 第16号 201813

Julia M. KAWAMOTO(e.g., Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998), they are moreaccount that there are individual diﬀerences among

likely to recognize the corrective element of recasts.

teachers in terms of the use of feedback and L1 in the

Determining the optimal length of feedback is a way to

L2 classroom. Moreover, long-term training, regardless of

make recasts eﬀective. In Philpʼs study (2003), she foundthe number of years of experience, might be necessary

the shorter the recasts are, the easier it is for students tofor teachers to learn how to use form-based feedback

recognize and recall them.

eﬀectively and eﬃciently (Doman, 2009). Yet, throughAnother way to draw students

attention to thetheir preferences and experiences, there are teachers

corrective content is providing hints on students errors

who regard this method of instruction might not be of(prompts). For example, Ellis, Loewen, and Erlam (2006)

their interests or beliefs (Kawamoto, 2012).

used the regular past tense -ed as a target item in theirstudy. Although the intermediate students in their study

This study was supported by the Japan Society for

had already studied this grammatical form, they foundthe Promotion of Science grant (#26284080) underthat the students had extreme diﬃculty in controllingthe advisement of Chiaki Iwai from Hiroshima City

their tense errors, particularly in oral communication.

University.

From their results, they noticed that the group who
received metalinguistic feedback (prompts) had more
control over their knowledge of the past tense compared

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some drawbacks to the use of prompts where teachers

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Limitations and future research
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Appendix
要旨 ‑ 本研究では，日本の大学の言語授業における意味交渉の使用について調査した。形式主体のフィードバック，
意味主体のフィードバック及び第一言語の使用またはいず
れかを通し，教員が意味交渉を使用したのか若しくは修正
アウトプットを使用したのかについて調査することを目的
大学教育実践ジャーナル 第16号 201815