Student Input and Negotiation of Meaning in ESL Writing Conferences

Research and practice in composition pedagogy suggest that student-teacher conferences play an important role in helping students become more effective writers. Many students, teachers, and researchers believe that conferences are valuable because they allow students to control the interaction, actively participate, and clarify their teachers' responses. This paper reports the results of a study that examined the degree to which these characteristics were present in conferences between one teacher and each of three students enrolled in an advanced ESL composition course. In addition, the study looked at the students' texts to determine how students dealt with the revisions discussed in the conferences and the role negotiation of meaning played in the success of such revisions. There were large differences in the degree to which students participated in the conferences and negotiated meaning. In addition, students who negotiated meaning made revisions in the following draft that improved the text. In contrast, when students did not negotiate meaning, even when they actively participated in the conference, they tended either not to make revisions or to make mechanical, sentence-level changes that often resulted in texts that were not qualitatively better than previous drafts.