The effect of negotiation of meaning on the storytelling of adult students in ESL classrooms

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of negotiation of meaning (NOM) on the quality of stories told by learners in ESL classrooms. Negotiated meaning has taken an important role in second language theories in that it is seen as providing learners with chances for making input comprehensible and for producing comprehensible output. Stories are sense-making activities and products of cultural experiences. Therefore, there are great possibilities for negotiation of meaning when learners tell stories in ESL classrooms with students of different cultural background.
To investigate the effect of NOM on broader discourse categories produced during storytelling by adult learners in ESL classrooms, 42 students of different language proficiency levels were assigned randomly to two groups. One group told a story for 2-3 minutes to classmates and the teacher, followed by a 3-4 minute period during which the storyteller negotiated the meaning of certain points in the story with the audience. After the NOM session, students retold the story to a different audience in a different classroom. The control group did not have their NOM sessions between the two tellings. Data were analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative ways. New criteria were developed to evaluate the quality of stories based on structural elements of stories. Text analysis was used to elucidate interesting cases in a more detailed way.
Results of quantitative analyses indicated that there were no clear group effects and no interaction effects, even though there were time (second story > first) and level effects. Therefore, it cannot be simply argued that NOM played an important role in improving the second telling. Based on the results of the qualitative analysis, however, the nature of the improvement between the two groups seemed to be different. Also, a detailed investigation of NOM sessions revealed that there seemed to be good NOM sessions and less effective NOM sessions. Factors that led to good NOM sessions were several: amount of information exchanged during the NOM sessions; to-the-point questions posed by their audience; and tellers’ ability to take in the information.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Chapter 1:Introduction
Research Questions
Chapter 2:Literature Review
Research on Negotiation of Meaning
Storytelling
Chapter Summary
Chapter 3:Method
Participants
Procedure
Plans for data analysis
Chapter 4:Results of Quantitative Data Analyses
Descriptive Statistics
Hypothesis Testing
Chapter Summary
Chapter 5:Results of Qualitative Data Analyses
Five Cases From the NOM-Group that showed Improvement
A Case from the non-NOM Group that showed great Improvement
Improvement in the NOM Group Versus Improvement in the non-NOM Group
Cases That did not Benefit from their NOM Sessions
Less Effective NOM Sessions
Chapter Summary
Chapter 6:Conclusion
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