5.3 Conclusions:Based on the results of this study, the following conclusions were drawn:1- The foreign language learning classroom is a rich environment for negotiation, both conversational and didactic, though conversational negotiation in terms of meaning, content, and agreement occurred far more frequently than didactic negotiation in terms of form. The greater frequency of conversational negotiation might be due to the fact that it was the comprehension of the reading passage that greatly mattered, such comprehension was achieved by negotiating the meaning and content rather than form.2- Like adults and children, adolescents are also capable of negotiating the meaning and content of reading passages.3- Negotiation is not necessarily triggered by a trouble source, especially in reading for comprehension. That is, negotiation routines can be initiated to check students’ knowledge of the meaning of vocabulary, to elicit knowledge concerning the informational content of the passage, or to seek agreement regarding controversial issues in order to increase the comprehensibility of the passage. For this reason, the initiation-response-feedback routines far outnumbered the nonunderstanding negotiation routines.4- Any single negotiation routine can involve more than one trouble source as well as focus on more than one type of negotiation; content-oriented, meaning-oriented, form-oriented, or agreement-oriented, hence giving rise to extended negotiation routines.5- In treating one trouble source, more than one negotiation strategy can be drawn upon.6- The frequencies of the negotiation strategies varied widely; they were used in the following descending order: repetitions and paraphrases, questioning, explanations, comprehension checks, clarification requests, backchannels, and confirmation checks.7- Repetition and paraphrase received the highest frequency. The provision of repetition was based on the belief that they enable the rest of the class to hear what the speaker (i.e. classmate student) said; provide a model of well-formed input; and provide students with opportunities to have a second look at their utterances and those of the others and to reformulate them in a better way accordingly.8- Negotiation strategies also varied in terms of who initiated them, the teacher or the students. Comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and frames were teacher-initiated, whereas repetitions, questioning, clarification requests, explanations, and backchannels were both teacher- and student-initiated. It may be the nature of the foreign language learning classroom as a context of unequal power discourse that might discourage the students from checking the teacher’s comprehension or confirmation.9- Students initiated far more clarification requests than did the teacher, implying that the students were courageous enough to express nonunderstanding in public and shouldered more responsibility for rough-tuning the input to their current level of competence, hence obtaining more comprehensible input. The lower number of teacher-initiated clarification requests, on the other hand, indicated that the teacher was not keen on initiating too many nonunderstanding routines because of her fear that they might increase students’ anxiety and embarrassment, and discourage them from taking part in the conversation accordingly. Nonunderstanding routines were initiated only when the teacher failed to make out what the students were saying (i.e. in cases of hearing problems) and when the trouble source was necessary to be overcome for the sake of comprehension and language development. This is explained by the higher frequency of meaning and form negotiations rather than content-oriented ones; it is meaning and form that help develop the students’ linguistic system.10- Students’ clarification requests were more explicitly rather than implicitly stated in contrast with those of the teacher, which were far more implicit rather than explicit. By using implicit rather than explicit indicators and by not using explicit statements of nonunderstanding, the teacher intended to avoid putting students in an embarrassing situation, in a threatening atmosphere in which they might lose face and withdraw from conversation accordingly.11- Teacher’s clarification requests were triggered by meaning, content, form, and hearing problems, while students’ clarifications were triggered primarily by meaning problems. This denotes that it is their comprehension of the meaning of vocabulary items or phrases that is more responsible for facilitating their having access to content and form, and consequently for rendering the passage more comprehensible. The fact that hearing-oriented negotiations were more than the other types may be justified by the students’ being shy or by the existence of a stranger, the person who was video-recording the sessions.12- Comprehension checks fulfilled two functions: to elicit the students’ confirmation of understanding and to expose such understanding in various ways.13- Questioning strategies were depended upon heavily in negotiating content and meaning. Yet, content-oriented questions far outnumbered meaning oriented ones, which could be explained by the nature and aim of the task; that is, it was a reading comprehension task whose primary purpose was to read for comprehension. For attaining such comprehension, the informational content ought to be clear and comprehensible for the students; it was the questions that helped chunking or analysing this information, hence rendering it more comprehensible. Besides, the lower number of meaning-focused questions could be explained by the fact that the students initiated a greater number of nonunderstanding routines that were meaning-oriented, thus leaving a small number of items for the teacher to check. Moreover, content-oriented questions varied widely, implying that they addressed various skills of reading; they were not limited to eliciting details, they also addressed getting the main ideas (analysis questions), making inferences based on contextual clues (inference questions), and summarizing the content in the students’ own words (summary questions).14- Repair or correction was either self-initiated or other-initiated on the part of the teacher but instances of a third-party repair rarely occurred.