Negotiation of Teaching Methods in ELT Classroom

With the influences of humanistic conceptions of society, the importance of education in the development of democracy and the views of human psychology, the negotiation in learning process in which the learners are active participants is under heated discussion through a number of TESOL practitioners about the applicability of their theory to practice. Considering the constraints in China and Curriculum Pyramid in Breen and Littlejohn´s theory, the article tries to introduce negotiation into classroom teaching pedagogy under the Chinese cultural background as an experiment to measure the feasibility of negotiation in Chinese ELT classroom. Starting with the concept of negotiation, the article classifies negotiation into three kinds in terms of the main purposes they serve in the communication. Moreover, based on the classroom decision-making theory in TESOL field, this article applies one aspect of the principle of negotiation in the TESOL curriculum, namely, teaching methods to implement the process of negotiation, in order to offer suggestions and criteria to teachers as well as college administrators on how to motivate college English learners in classroom by adopting negotiation.