Tenor Relations in Negotiating Meaning in an EFL Writing Task : Exploring Individual Contributions

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This paper presents an analysis of metalanguage-scaffolded small-group workshop talk involving first-year university EFL reading-writing students. The students worked together to confirm or correct their responses to one recall-inference writing task. Successfully completing the task necessitated students' appropriate use of specific English writing metalanguage in their discourse to determine the corresponding paragraph and essay parts of English writing. Reviewing the completed task sheets and discourse transcription of one representative small group's talk reveals that the students engaged in four sequences through which they negotiated the completion of the task. A preliminary analysis of the students' completed task sheets suggests that they made use of the appropriate metalanguage. Equally, the discourse transcription discloses that students "successfully concluded" their confirmation-correction talk to resolve the recall-inference task. Closer analysis, however, reveals that an interpersonal struggle ensued among individual members, the dynamic of which constituted the key factor in driving the task to completion. This paper will present some of the major linguistic features that illuminate the kind of tenor relations at work in resolving this small-group task. It will also suggest that individual student contributions to talk task resolutions may not be readily discernible from reviewing task sheets and tape transcriptions alone.
2004-10-01