整体外语教学中的意义协商活动

Based on the clarification of conversation and interaction and meaning negotiation from the perspectives of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, this paper puts forward a broader sense of meaning negotiation. It encompasses explicit interaction among interactants and implicit interaction hidden in discourse itself between the speaker and the hearer, or the author and the reader. These two types of meaning negotiation activities should be included in foreign language teaching. The paper suggests that a four-step teaching procedure be employed to engage students in pertinent learning-centered meaning-negotiation activities. It can be done in the light of genre characteristics of different discourses, including reproducing the content, building a new situational context, planning the discourse structure and choosing the wording. By means of these cooperative learning activities the students will understand and express discourse meaning in better ways, improve their language proficienc