Negotiation is always an interesting topic. It's something that comes naturally with your L1 and you don't even realize you need to learn how to negotiate until you begin to acquire a second language.
I remember being in Spain and having to learn the basics of having a conversation. Negotiation after all is learning to talk, correct? Wrong. After reading these chapters, I have come to realize that we negotiate far more than in just in conversation. Obviously it is important to be able to recognize errors in a conversation and fix them and use filler word to complete a dialogue, but where else do we see negotiation?
We see negotiation in reading. Every time a text is read and analyzed, negotiation occurs. Ideas are bounced back and forth between the reader making inferences and what the text actually says. Negotiation with texts also requires prior knowledge, whereas in conversation, the speaker just needs to understand the context of the situation and the cultural norms on how to fix an awkward moment. When a student reads a text, in order to obtain a deeper meaning, they have to connect back to prior readings and tap into other knowledge.
I would also like to address the issue of 'talk management.' Generally, IRF is associated with talk management. Talk management is defined as how learners "conduct their classroom conversation in order to accomplish their immediate educational goals." (115). Does that mean that talk management is only used in the classroom context? I think not. With that being said, the books states "that the teacher is the one who teaches talk engagement and facilitates negotiated interaction by providing linguistic and paralinguistic cues to students to enhance their learning potential." (118-119) Through the use of IRF, conversation can be continued, clarified and better understood resulting in better comprehensible input and output.
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