Negotiation of meaning in interlanguage talk

This small-scale study investigated the extent to which negotiations of meaning during methodologically focused communicative partner-activities were concerned with a grammatical target structure, the dative case following spatial prepositions in German. In addition, the impact of the negotiation of the target structure on subsequent learner performance was investigated. The subjects, beginning-level students of German, participated in two two-way information-gap activities, preceded and followed by the same grammaticality judgment test. The interaction was audiotaped and transcribed. The improvement in accuracy between the pretest and the posttest was calculated and correlated with the number of negotiation moves. The results indicate that the subjects negotiated meaning, including form, frequently. However, no significant change in the subjects' subsequent performance was observed.