The negotiation of meaning in

children's foreign language

acquisition
Richard Young

This article is a result of work which has been done over a number of
years by the British Council in Hong Kong in curriculum development
for English as a foreign language in Hong Kong's primary schools. The
problem under consideration is how recent theoretical insights into the
acquisition of first and second languages by young children can be
drawn on in a workable methodology for teaching young learners a
foreign language in schools, and how syllabuses and teaching materials
can be designed to maximize the benefit of activity-based teaching
methods.
The article is in four parts: the first two parts outline two comple-
mentary theoretical approaches to children's foreign language
acquisition; in the third part, I consider three different teaching methods
in the light of theoretical insights; and lastly, I consider some issues in
syllabus and materials design which are particularly relevant to the
organization of the learning of foreign languages by young children in
schools.

The Monitor Theory Since 1975, Stephen Krashen and his associates have put forward a very
illuminating explanation for adult second language behaviour, which has
become known as the 'Monitor Theory'. This theory in its latest formula-
tion goes something like this (Krashen 1981): adults have two independent
ways of developing ability in second languages, subconscious language
acquisition and conscious language learning. And although these two systems
are interrelated in a definite way, subconscious acquisition appears to be
far more important than conscious language learning. The distinction
made by Krashen between the two terms acquisition and learning is not new.
It originated from the need to distinguish between the natural, informal
way in which children acquire their mother tongue, and the conscious,
formal way in which adults learn a foreign language.
The condition which is necessary in order to acquire a language, says
Krashen, is meaningful interaction in the target language, in which the
speakers are concerned not with theyorm of what they say, but rather with
the message that is being conveyed. As a result, the correction of errors and
the explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition,
although parents and native speakers may modify what they say in speak-
ing to children or foreign acquirers, in order to help them to understand.
On the other hand, conscious language learning takes place when the
focus is placed on the form of the message, rather than the content. And
learning in this sense is greatly helped by judicious correction of errors and
the explicit formulation of rules.
Now, the fundamental claim of the Monitor Theory is that conscious
learning is available to the performer only as a Monitor. In general, utter-

ELTJournal Volume3773July 1983 197

 ances are initiated through the acquired system, which is to say that our
productive ability in a foreign language is based on what we have 'picked
up' through active communication. The only function of what we have
consciously learned is to alter the output of the acquired system, some-
times before and sometimes after the utterance has been produced. The
conscious 'monitor' makes these changes in order to improve accuracy.
Krashen claims (Krashen 1977) that use of the monitor explains such
phenomena as discrepancies in oral and written second language per-
formance, and differences between careful classroom speech and students'
casual conversation. He also claims that it accounts for the observation that
certain students display a firm grasp of the structure of the target language
yet seem unable to function in the language, while others do poorly on
structure tests, but appear to be able to communicate quite well. He
develops the Monitor Theory in more detail, but we need go no further for
our purposes.
Krashen's hypodiesis relates specifically to adult second language
learning. The corollary for children learning second languages is that die
acquisition mode is far more important than the learning mode, the differ-
ence being even greater than for adults. From my experience, it is not true
to say that children do not monitor their own performances in a second
language, but it seems drat their degree of monitoring is far less than it
might be for adults. Krashen makes allowances for individual differences in
die use of the monitor, and on his scale of monitor users, I believe we
would probably find most children down at die 'Underuser' end of the
scale.1
What are die implications of diis in terms of teaching mediods? Most
important of all is surely that die major function of the second language
classroom is to provide intake for acquisition (Krashen 1981:101), and,
secondly, diat ways of teaching which concentrate on the form of language
do not provide the best intake for acquisition. One may infer, for example,
diat pattern practice drilling with a group of young children (chronic
'underusers' of die monitor) is likely to be more or less irrelevant to Uieir
acquisition and use of English as a foreign language, since it concentrates
on linguistic form, radier than on meaningful communication.

Negotiation Krashen's perspective on second language learning is a psychological one.

Let us now turn to die sociolinguistic perspective in die work of die British
educationist and linguist Gordon Wells at die University of Bristol.
Wells has been conducting a longitudinal study of die modier tongue
language development of a representative sample of young English
children, based on regular observations of die children's spontaneous
linguistic interaction at home and at school (Wells 1979). Wells' data are
collected by means of a radio microphone worn by die child. This
transmits the child's talk to a tape recorder diat is programmed to record
twenty-four ninety-second samples at approximately twenty-minute
intervals diroughout die day between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. In die evening the
tape is played back to die modier, who provides as much information as
possible about what was going on while the recordings were being made.
The diing which I find most interesting in Wells' work is one of his pre-
liminary findings: the more opportunities die child has to experience
linguistic interacdon widi his or her parents before entering school, die
higher is die child's level of linguistic development when he or she enters
school; and diat diis is closely related to reading ability, even after two

198 Richard Young

 years in school. To show the different types of interaction that he is talking
about, Wells quotes two young children interacting with their mothers. The
first child engages her mother in conversation, and each initiation on the
child's part is accepted and developed by the mother, so that a regular
process of negotiation of meaning occurs throughout. The second child's
mother, on the other hand, does not respond to her daughter's initia-
tions: there is none of the co-operative behaviour which characterized the
conversation of the first pair. When the second child's interests and inten-
tions conflict with her own, the mother makes no attempt to negotiate a
mutually agreed resolution. Wells claims that the first type of co-operative
interaction is a major aid to a child's linguistic development. It is negotia-
tion that Wells sees as crucial, the way in which, through interaction,
mutually agreed meanings and behaviour are arrived at.
How is this relevant to teaching English as a foreign language to children
at school ? If meaningful communicative interactions in which the par-
ticipants negotiate common ground by a process of give-and-take are so
important for first language development, then surely they must also have
an important role to play in the way children acquire a second language. I
am supported in this belief by Joseph Huang and Evelyn Hatch's remark-
able study (Huang and Hatch 1978) of the acquisition of English syntax by
a five-year-old Taiwanese-speaking child, who acquired English as a
second language naturally through interaction with his peer-group and the
teachers (who did not set out to teach him English) in a play-group in Los
Angeles. The child, Paul, in nineteen weeks proceeded from knowing his
native Taiwanese quite well, but knowing hardly any English, to a state
where 'it appeared that his language was indistinguishable from that of the
American children with whom he played' (Huang and Hatch 1978:131). In
other words, Paul learned a second language in nineteen weeks without
formal language training. One wonders how much longer it would have
taken him if he had gone to English classes! In teaching English to children
at school, as teachers plough relentlessly from one language item to
another, they may well be making progress from the point of view of the
syllabus, but they may be making very little progress in assisting the
acquisition of the second language by the pupils. Progress in language
development, as Wells suggests for children in their mother tongue and as I
would suggest for children learning a foreign language, can only be made
by allowing the children to experience a wide range of interactions in which
meaning and behaviour can be negotiated. If we do not figure out some
way for this to happen in the primary school classroom, then any
impression we have that pupils are making progress will be largely illusory.

Negotiation in Here, then, I believe, are two extremely valuable theoretical insights into
the classroom how young children learn a second language. Firstly, children do not use
their learned store anything like so much as adults are able to: children rely
to a very great extent on the language they have acquired while they have
been concentrating on meaning rather than form. It must then be our job
as teachers to provide our young pupils with inputs to their language
acquisition system, rather than inputs to their formal learning system.
Secondly, meaningful interaction implies more than just linguistic inter-
action, and it is indispensable to create the conditions for interactions in
which meaning can be negotiated if children are to make progress in
acquiring a second language.
These are the two insights. How, then, can we create the optimum con-

The negotiation ojmeaning 199

 ditions in the primary school classroom for second language acquisition?
As far as I can see, there are at least three techniques which go some way
towards it.

Meaningful practice The first technique is meaningful language practice. The transcript below is
taken from a film that was made in Hong Kong in 1976 called The Four
Stage Approach. It shows four stages from presentation to production of the
first, second, and third person singular of the present perfect tense. The
extract is taken from the last part of the film, during the final stage of the
lesson.
(A Chinese teacher of English faces a class of 40 8- and 9-year-old children.
The children are sitting in rows facing the teacher.)
Teacher: Now let's begin. Whoever makes the correct guess will win an apple
for their team. Group A, who would like to come out? Tarn Lai-keung.
(Tarn walks towards the teacher.)
Teacher: Class, put down your heads.
(The class put their heads on their desks. They cannot see what is happen-
ing as Tarn Lai-keung closes the box on the teacher's table.)
Teacher: All right. Everybody look up. Group A.
(She conducts Group A in chorus.)
Group A: What has she done?
Teacher: Chan Man-fai,
Chan Man-fai: Has she touched the blackboard?
(Teacher conducts Group B in chorus.)
Group B: Have you touched the blackboard ?
Tarn Lai-keung: N o , I haven't.
(Teacher conducts Group A in chorus.)
Group A: No, she hasn't. She hasn't touched the blackboard. What has she
done?
Leung Tak-man: Has she closed the box?
(Teacher conducts Group B in chorus.)
Group B: Have you closed the box?
Tom Lai-keung: Yes, I have.
(Teacher conducts Group A in chorus.)
Group A: Yes, she has. She has closed the box.
Teacher: Very good, Group A. One apple for you.
(Teacher draws an apple on Group A's tree.)
Teacher (to Tarn Lai-kuen): Go back to your seat.
What can we say about this activity? How does it measure up to the
requirements of a meaningful communication activity in which meaning is
negotiated as a result of co-operative interaction?
The first thing we can say is that there is very little negotiation going on.
The children are free to make their own guesses about what the child at the
front has done, and if their guess is incorrect they have to make another
one, but the teacher is controlling the interaction so tightly that it is she
who leads the children through the various steps of the negotiation. It is not
die children who are negotiating the outcome of the situation, but die
teacher. Moreover, although the teacher tries to motivate the class to par-
ticipate by transforming the activity into a competitive game in which each
team tries to win apples to put on their tree, it seems to me that die main
motivating force in die whole interaction is a desire to follow the teacher's
instructions, i.e. her gestures as she conducts the class through the different

200 Richard Young

 stages of the interaction.
One other thing is that this type of interaction, in which large groups are
speaking in unison, is not very appropriate to a meaningful negotiating
activity, since the individual responses of the participants to the situation
are suppressed because of the need to present a united front. To sum up,
then, here we have the illusion of negotiation: the students are all speak-
ing, using the pattern that the teacher has presented, in a meaningful
activity, but the nature of the interaction is such that it does not create the
conditions in which language can be acquired. An illusion of relevance is
created, and if the children enjoyed the activity (which a good teacher
would ensure), we also have the illusion of success. However, it becomes
dear that diese are illusions if we measure the activity against our criteria of
genuine negotiation which provides input to the learners' language
acquisition system.

Communication games Let us now look at an example of a communication activity. Once again,
the example is taken from film made of a lesson in a Hong Kong primary
school.
The children in this class, aged nine and ten, are seated in small groups
of four or five around die room. The teacher has introduced the func-
tions: requesting simple objects and complying with or refusing the
requests. She has devised a card game to enable die children to perform
these functions in a realistic context. Each child in the group has four
cards: on two of the cards die name of an object is written; on die other
diere are pictures of objects, but no words. The aim of die game is for each
player to win pairs of cards—a word-card and die corresponding picture-
card—by requesting pictures from die odier players. Each player can ask
any odier player for die picture he or she needs to make a pair. When a pair
is formed, die two cards are placed side-by-side face down on die table. If
die odier player is unable to comply widi die request, die turn passes to
anodier child, and so on round die table. The game finishes when one
player has made all his or her pairs and has laid diem down on die table:
diis player is die winner. Aldiough die rules sound complicated, diey are
well known to die children playing die game, since diey are very similar to a
card game which is popular in Hong Kong. Four children are seated
around a table.
May: Will you give me a bag, please?
John: (hands bag picture to May) Here you are.
May: Thank you. (She lays her trick down on die table.)
John: Will you give me a watch, please ?
Bonnie: Sorry, I haven't got one. Will you give me a shoe, please?
Sandra .-'Sorry, I haven't got one. Will you give me a watch, please?
. . May: Sorry, I haven't got one. Will you give me a watch, please ?
John: (hands watch picture to May) Here you are.
May: Thank you.
John: (to Sandra) Will you give me a radio, please? (pause) Will you give me
a radio, please ?
Sandra: (hands radio picture to John) Here you are.
John: Thank you. (He lays his trick down on the table.)
Bonnie: Will you give me a car, please ?
Sandra: Sorry, I haven't got one. (pause) Will you give me a camera, please?
May: Sorry, I haven't got one. Will you give me a shoe, please?
Sandra: (hands shoe picture to May) Here you are.

The negotiation of meaning 201

 May: Thank you. (She lays her third trick on the table and shows her empty
hands to the other players to show she is the winner.)
How does this measure up to our criteria? Although the children are
using only very simple language, they are involved in an activity which
allows each individual to negotiate his or her way through the interaction
in the way which suits the child best according to the rules of the game. The
focus of the children's attention is more on the game itself than on the
language required to play it. Thus, this kind of activity does provide input
to the children's language acquisition system, and not just to their
language learning system.
Children's games The last type of activity that I would like to discuss is children's games, the
sorts of games which children diemselves play in the playground and
outside school, which in their design have nothing whatsoever to do with
learning English. I think it is worth considering this sort of activity, because
children's games are, if you like, deliberately negotiable and com-
municative, and the focus of the activity is some non-linguistic outcome.
Three types of game seem to be promising. These are making models, music
and drama games, and what, for want of a better word, I call games for a rainy
day (cf. Huang et al. 1979). Under making models I include things like sailing
model boats, making plasticine or rice-flour figures, making dolls' houses,
matchstick furniture, melon seed animals, dolls' clothes, corn dollies, tree-
houses and paper hats, boats and buildings. Music and drama games include
puppet shows, dances, making masks, decorating your body, and many
more. Games for a rainy day are board games like snakes and ladders, pencil-
and-paper games (like noughts and crosses), collecting things, watching
television, and keeping pets.
In these sorts of games and activities, language may be a central part of
the interaction, and we can therefore perhaps adapt them to our purposes
for language learning. For example, in learning from someone else how to
build a model, quite a lot of language is used and it is put to some useful
non-linguistic purpose in the interaction.
My last example of actual interaction activities is an adaptation of a
children's game for use in the classroom. The example here is the piece of
teaching material shown in Fig. 1, rather than a transcript of an actual
lesson. In this game a number of children stand around in a circle holding
on to a continuous piece of string threaded through a ring. By moving
dieir hands from side to side, they can pass die ring secretly from one
player to the next. One child stands in the middle of the circle and has to
try and guess which of the players is holding the ring. The player in the
middle points to whoever she thinks has got the ring and says, for example,
'Leung Wai-ming's got the ring'. Leung Wai-ming then has to open his
hands. If he has not got the ring, the rest of the players chorus, 'No, he
hasn't', and so on, until the player in die middle has found the ring. The
person who is caught holding the ring then changes places with the child in
die middle of the circle and the game can start again.
I diink it is clear that here, too, is an activity which fits quite well into the
mould diat we require. We have a game, the main purpose of which is to
find the ring, but in order to achieve that, the situation has to be nego-
tiated by means of language. The language used is simple in the extreme
(just die diird person singular of have got) and is well within the com-
petence of children in Hong Kong towards die end of dieir first year in
primary school.

202 Richard Young

 Figure 1.

Let's play Ringaround. j

Joe's got the ring. \s

Y\p Siu-lan's got the ring.

No, she hasn't*

No, she hasn't got the ring.

I've got thering!J

Here then we have three examples of activities in the primary school

English classroom: rather rigid teacher-centred language practice, a com-
munication game, and an adapted children's game. I believe that only the
last two are of any use in allowing children to acquire English through a
natural process of negotiating meanings in interaction. The language
practice activity merely creates an illusion that the children are learning,
whereas in fact very little useful learning is taking place.

Negotiation and If communication activities and children's games are so useful in teaching
syllabus design English to young children, how dien is it possible for us to organize our
syllabus and materials to make the most of these kinds of activity? Before
answering this question, I would like to follow Wilkins (1976) in drawing a
distinction between synthetic and analytic language teaching syllabuses. The
distinction has to do with how the target language is presented to the
learner. If the language is chopped up into litde bits and the bits are dien

The negotiation of meaning 203

 fed one by one to die learners, the teaching materials are said to be
organized according to a 'synthetic' syllabus. If, on die other hand, diere is
no attempt at diis careful linguistic control of the learning environment,
but language is presented in a form which is limited in scope simply by the
amount of time available to teach it, and if the presentation of different
units is sequenced on purely non-linguistic grounds, we have materials
which are organized according to an 'analytic' syllabus.
The great majority of teaching materials available for beginners reflect
an underlying syndietic syllabus, rather than an analytic one. Most of die
previous generation of beginners' courses had grammatical structure as
dieir organizing principle. In diese materials, each unit is defined in terms
of die grammatical patterns to be covered, and die order of presentation of
new material is regulated by considerations of grammatical complexity. A
new generation of materials is now available whose organizing principle is
no longer grammatical patterns, but radier communicative function:
instead of having a unit on, say, die present continuous tense, you will have
one whose aim is to teach, say, requests. The units in a functional course
are not subject to die rigid ordering implied by a grammatical syllabus, but
nevertheless considerations of linguistic simplicity may apply. A diird
category of materials for beginners aims to effect a compromise between
functional and structural organization, and to exploit the fact diat, at die
very lowest level of linguistic and communicauve competence, one function
tends to be realized uniquely in terms of one structure (for example, for
beginners die function of asking permission is most conveniendy covered
by one grammatical pattern, 'Can I . . ., please?'). Here, the question of
whedier the function or die structure is die principal objective is largely
irrelevant, since die grammatical structure is taught in order to perform die
communicative function and die communicative function is uniquely
realized by that grammatical structure.
In diese diree types of syllabuses for beginners—structural, functional,
and functional-structural—discrete linguisdc or behavioural items are die
basis of die syllabus organization. They are therefore, in Wilkins' terms, all
syndietic syllabuses. Recently, synthetic syllabuses have come to be criti-
cized independently by applied linguists working in Lancaster (Breen,
Candlin, and Waters 1979) and in Hong Kong (Tongue and Gibbons 1982),
and a genuine alternative to diem has been put forward in Soudi India by
N. S. Prabhu and D. Carrol.
Breen, Candlin, and Waters make die point diat, whereas structural
materials are easy to organize, communicauve materials are not. In dieir
words, given die present state of dieory and research into language as com-
munication, it seems diat such data are not amenable to die kind of systematic
organization or categorization which have been applied when presendng
language as form.
These writers suggest diat 'teachers and designers need be far less con-
cerned with die prior selection and organization of the data and much
more concerned widi the ways learners may act upon and interact with such data!
(Breen et at. 1979). The main point is that communicauve materials will be
more concerned with the teaching-learning process dian widi die content
of teaching and learning. These audiors also make a distinction between
what diey call 'content materials' on die one hand, and 'process materials'
on die other. By 'content materials' diey mean either audientic spoken or
written language, or else reference materials such as dictionaries and
grammar books. 'Process materials', on die odier hand, are units or frame-

204 Richard Young

 works of activity. Each unit or framework would outline an activity and a
range of appropriate tasks within the activity, and each task would be
designed to activate the learner's process competence through com-
municative acts.
Tongue and Gibbons deal specifically with syllabus design for young
beginners and maintain that a synthetic syllabus specified in either struc-
tural or linguistic terms is unnecessary and undesirable for young children.
They give a few examples of 'activities' which could be items in an analytic
English syllabus for beginners. They mention, for example, activities like
'solving simple problems and puzzles', 'responding to signs and symbols',
and 'making surveys of pupils' habits and tastes'.
The most thoroughgoing support for an analytic syllabus based on
activities is given by N. S. Prabhu and David Carrol in their interesting
work in the Regional Institute of English in Bangalore, South India. N. S.
Prabhu has designed what he calls a 'procedural syllabus' (Prabhu and
Carrol 1980). The basic idea is that the pupils should learn English through
the performance of certain tasks and activities, rather than by focusing on
the language itself. However, the pupils in the classes in the Bangalore
Project are not absolute beginners; they are secondary schoolchildren who
have already had a number of years of learning English in primary schools.
They have learned English before, according to a structural syllabus, so it
could be said that they have learned (in Krashen's sense) rather than
acquired the major grammatical patterns of English, as well as some
vocabulary. The Bangalore Project, therefore, is to some extent concerned
with the activation of this learned grammar.

Conclusions The problem that remains is, I think, this: with zero beginners, with young
children in primary schools, is it possible in English lessons to organize
communicative activities which focus on meaning rather than on linguistic
form? The answer to this question, I think, can be found if we make a clear
distinction between syllabus and methodology. Those who advocate
abandoning entirely a structural or funaional syllabus and replacing it by
one based on activities are, I feel, over-reacting to one particular defect in
audio-lingual methodology, and in so doing are throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. Grammarians over the years, and sociolinguists for the
last twenty years, have given us extremely valuable insights into the way in
which language functions as a formal system, and the way in which
language is used for communication. Surely, if we organize our language
teaching programme for beginners in terms of these insights, we can only
gain in terms of coverage of all the necessary grammatical patterns and
communicative functions, in terms of how deeply we go into a particular
area of grammar or of communication, and in terms of the necessary
recycling of elements in order that they are retained.
It is not crucial whether we mention grammatical or functional items in
our syllabus. The crucial question is how we arrange them and then, in our
teaching materials, how we create the circumstances whereby those gram-
matical or funaional items are contextualized in activities which are
genuinely communicative in the sense that they permit individual children
to negotiate meaning in order to perform the activity. What we need is a
multi-dimensional syllabus in which linguistic and communicative
elements are clustered together around a particular classroom or out-of-
class attivity. If our students are young children unable to use their
'monitors' much, then the successful completion of the activity will become

The negotiation of meaning 205

 the objective of that particular teaching unit. If, on the other hand, we are
dealing with older children or adults who may benefit from input into their
learning system (in Krashen's sense), then let us by all means also do exer-
cises which practise the linguistic forms and communicative functions
which we have used in the activity.
There are, therefore, two extreme positions to be avoided. According to
the first, linguistic structure is the sole aim and arbiter of everything which
goes on in the classroom. In the second, all insights from linguistics and
communicative theory are purposely ignored, and activities are designed
with no concern at all for linguistic or communicative features. In teaching
English to young beginners, an activity-based methodology combined with
a structural/functional syllabus is the best way of organizing input to the
children's acquisition system. D
Received May 1982

Note
1 Krashen and his collaborators talk of 'underusers' as communication—proposals for syllabus design,
of the monitor (those who take little account of the methodology, evaluation'. Regional Institute of English
rules they know when actually producing language), (South India) Newsletter Special Series 1.4. Bangalore.
'overusers' of the monitor (who are inhibited by the Regional Institute of English (South India). 1980.
rules they have learnt), and 'optimum users' of die Report on Bangalore Project. Bulletin No. 4.
monitor. Tongue, R. and J. Gibbons. 1982. 'Structural
syllabuses and the young beginner'. Applied
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206 Richard Young