Students’ Negotiations Of Meaning In Their Speaking Performances In An Indonesian University EFL Classroom

Abstract

This article reveals how students negotiate meanings in their speaking performances in an Indonesian university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom and effects of the students’ negotiations of meaning on their speaking performances in the EFL classroom. Employing a single-case study design, the research leading to the findings was conducted in an EFL classroom at a state university in Makassar, Indonesia. The data were obtained through classroom observation. The findings disclose that in their speaking performances in the EFL classroom, the students performed negotiations of meaning through request for message clarification, repetition, confirmation, elaboration and simplification and the negotiations of meaning used by the students mostly interacted with each other as adjacency pairs. Indisputably, those findings suggest that negotiations of meaning are essentially communicative tools that enable EFL students, particularly those with still low level of English, to build and maintain interactive communications among them.