A Study on Negotiation for Meaning in Taiwanese College Students’ Writing Achievement

• Main Authors: LIN, MING-JIE, 林明潔
• Other Authors: TAI, YA-MING
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/gf7xz2

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 兒童英語教育學系碩士班 === 105 === The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Negotiation for Meaning (NfM) and Taiwanese college students’ improvement in writing. Furthermore, it explored the revision types students resorted to when negotiating for meaning during peer response session. The participants were 37 English-major freshmen in one of Taiwan’s university. They went through four peer response sessions in which they reviewed and negotiated four writing assignments of different mode, including process writing, descriptive writing, opinion writing and narrative writing. The participants reviewed peers’ first drafts, negotiated for meaning with group members, and composed the revised drafts immediately. Both the NfM episodes and the drafts were rated for quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results showed that generally the revised drafts outperformed the first ones in total score and in content, organization, wording and grammar except for sentence structure. Both process and descriptive writing improved prominently in grammar and in total score. Few higher-quality NfM was produced, and most of them led to the revised drafts that performed equally to their first ones. Therefore, NfM quality was not closely related to the improvement of writing. Three revision types adopted in peer response sessions included self correction, on-the-spot modification and negotiation for meaning. The most frequently used is on-the-spot modification, followed by negotiation for meaning and self correction. 16% of on-the-spot modification, 33% of negotiation for meaning and 33% of self correction improved the revised drafts. This study indicated that peer response could facilitate student’s cognitive thinking and social interaction skills. It could also help instructors realize students’ difficulties through their discussion and revisions in draft. Instructors are suggested to give students more assistance and provide them as much practice as possible in order to promote their negotiation and revision skills. Future studies are suggested to implement the same writing mode to observe students’ improvement, inspect whether the reviewers are benefited from peer response, and include the accuracy of suggestions as a rating standard for NfM quality.