What
is interaction
Collaborative
exchange of thought, feeling, or ideas between two or more people, resulting in
a reciprocal effect on each other.
Theories
of communicative competence emphasize the importance of interaction as human
beings use language in various context to ‘negotiate’ meaning, or simply stated, to get an idea out of one
person’s head and into the head of another
person and vice versa
INTERACTIVE
LANGUAGE TEACHING
¨ Through interaction, students can increase their
language store as they listen to or read authentic linguistic material, or even
output of their fellow students in discussion, skits, joint problem-solving
tasks, or dialog journals. In interaction, students can use all they possess of
the language—all they have learned or casually absorved—in real-life exchanges.
... Even at an elementary stage, they learn in this way to exploit the
elasticity of language. (Wilga Revers,
1987:4-5)
Interactive
Principles
¨ Automaticity
¨ Intrinsic motivation
¨ Strategic Investment
¨ Risk-Taking
¨ The language-culture connection
¨ Interlanguage
¨ Communicative competence
¨ Automaticity
Truc
human interaction is best accomplished when focal attention is on meanings and
message and not on grammar and other
linguistic forms. Learners are thus freed from keeping language in a controlled
mode and can more easily proceed to automatic modes of processing.
¨ Intrinsic motivation
As
students become engaged with each other in speech acts of fulfillment and
self-actualization, their deepest drives
are satisfied. And as they more fully appreciate their own competence to use
language, they can develop a system of self-reward.
¨ Strategic Investment
Interaction
requires the use of strategic language competence both to make certain decisions on how to say or write or
interpret language, and to make repairs when comunication pathways are blocked.
The spontaneity of interactive discourse requires judicious use of numerous
strategies for production and comprehension.
¨ Risk-Taking
Interaction
requires the risk of failing to produce intended meaning, of failing to
interpret intended meaning (on the part of someone else), of being laughed at,
of being shunned or rejected. The reward, of course, are great and worth the
risk.
¨ The language-culture connection
The
cultural loading of interactive speech as well as writing requires that
interlocuters be throughly versed in the cultural nunaces of langauge.
¨ Interlanguage
The
complexity of interaction entails a long developmental process of acquisition.
Numerous errors of production and comperehension will be a part of this
development. And the role of teacher feedback is crucial to the developmental
process.
¨ Communicative competence
All
of the elements of communicative competence (grammatical, discourse,
sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and strategic) are involved in human interaction.
All aspects must work together for succesfull communication to take place.
¨ The language-culture connection
The
cultural loading of interactive speech as well as writing requires that
interlocuters be throughly versed in the cultural nunaces of langauge.
¨ Interlanguage
The
complexity of interaction entails a long developmental process of acquisition.
Numerous errors of production and comperehension will be a part of this
development. And the role of teacher feedback is crucial to the developmental
process.
¨ Communicative competence
All
of the elements of communicative competence (grammatical, discourse,
sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and strategic) are involved in human interaction.
All aspects must work together for succesfull communication to take place.
Role
of The Interactive Teacher
¨ The teacher as Controller
¨ The Teacher as Director
¨ The Teacher as Manager
¨ The Teacher as Facilitator
¨ The Teacher as Resourcer
Interactive
language Teaching
¨ Sustaining Interaction through Group work
Advantages
¨ What is group work?
¨ It is a generic term covering a multiplicity of
techniques in which two or more students are assigned a task that involves
collaboration and self-initiated language.
Advantages
of group work for English language Classroom
¨ Group work generated interactive language
¨ Group work offers an embracing affective climate
¨ Group work promotes learner responsiblity and
autonomy
¨ Group workn is a step toward individualizing
instruction
Typical
Group Tasks
¨ Games
¨ Role-play and simulation
¨ Drama
¨ Projects
¨ Interview
¨ Braistorming
¨ Information gap
¨ Jigsaw
¨ Problem solving and decision making
¨ Opinion Exchange
Game
¨ A game could be any activity that formalizes a
technique into units that can be scored in some way. Guessing games are common
language classrom activities.
Role-play
and simulation
¨ Role-play minimally involves (a) giving a role to one
or more members of a group and (b) assigning an objective or purpose that
participants must accomplish. In pairs, for example, student A is an employer;
students B is a prosprective employee; the objectives is for A to interview B.
In groups, similar dual roles could be assumed with assignment to others in the
group to watch for certain grammatical or discourse elements as the roles are
acted out. Or a group role play might
involve a discussion of a political issue, with each person assignmed to
represent a particular political point of view.
¨ Simulation usually onvolve a more complex structure
and often larger group (of 6 to 20) where the entire group is working through
an imaginary situation as a social unit, the object of which is to solve some
specific problem. A common genre of simulation game specifies that all members
of the group are shipwrecked on a “desert islan”. Each person has been assigned an occupation
(doctor, carpenter, garbage collector, etc.) and perhaps some other
compromising characteristics (a physical disability, an ex-convict, a
prostitute, etc.) only a specified subset of the group can survive on the
remaining food supply, so the group must decide who will live and who will die.
Drama
¨ Drama is a more formalized form of role-paly or
simulation, with a pre-planned story line and script. Sometimes small group may
prepare their own short dramatizaation
of some events, writing the script and rehearsing the scene as a group. This
may be more commonly referred to as a “skit”. Longer, more involved dramatic
performances have been shown to have positive effects on language laerning, but
they are time consuming and rarely can form part of a typical school
curriculum.
Projects
¨ For learners of all ages, but perhaps especially for
younger learners who can greatly benefit from hands-on appraoches to language,
certain projects can be rewarding indeed. If you were to adopt an environmental
awarness theme in your class, for example, various small group could each be
doing different things: group A creates an enviroentmental bulletin board for
the rest of the school; group B develops fact sheets; group C makes a three-dimensional
display; Group D puts out a newsletter for the rest of the school; group E
develops a skit, and so on. As learners get absorbed in purposeful projects,
both receptive and productive language is used meaningfully.
Interview
¨ A popular activity for pair work, but also appropiate
for group work, interviews are useful at all levels of proficiency. At the
lower levels, interviews can be very structured, both in terms of the
information that is sought and the grammatical difficukty and variety. The goal
of an interview could at this level be limited to using requesting functions,
learning vocabulary for expressing personal data, producing questions, etc.
students might ask each other questions like
-What’s your name?
-Where do you live?
-What country (city) are you from?
and learn to give appropaite responses. At
the higher levels, interviews can probe more complex facts, opinion, ideas, and
feelings
Brainstorming
¨ It is a technique whose purpose is to initiate some
sort of thinking process. It gets students “creative juices” flowing without
necessarily focusing on specific problems or decisions or values. Brainstorming
is often put to excellent use in preparing students to read a text, to discuss
a complex issue, or to write on a topic. Brainstorming involves students in a
rapid-fire, free-association listing of concepts or ideas or facts or feeling
relevant to some topic or context.
Information
gap
¨ Information-gap activities include a tremendous
variety of technique in which the objective is to convey or to request
information. The two focal caharcteristics of information-gap tecnique are (a)
their primary attebtion to information and not to langauge forms and (b) the
necessity of communicative interaction
in order to reach the objective. The information that students must seek can
range from very simple to complex.
¨ At the beginning level, for example, each member of a
small group could be given the objective of finding out from the others their
birthday, adress, favorite food, etc.. And filling in a little chart with the information. In intermediate
class you could ask the groups to colectively pool informatuion about different
occupations: necessary qualifiactions, how long it takes to prepare for an
occupation, how much the preparation costs, what typical job conditions are,
what salary levels are, etc. In advanced classes, a small-group discussion on
determining an author’s message, among many other possibilities, would be an
information-gap technique.
Problem
solving and decision making
¨ Problem-solving group technique focus on the group’s
solution of a specified problem. They might or might not involve jigsaw
characteristics, and the problem itself might be relatively simple ( such as
giving direction on a map), moderately complex (such as working out an itibnerary from train, plane,
and bus schedules), or quite complex (such as solving a mystery in a “crime
story” or dealing with a political or moral dilemma). Once again,
problem-solving techbiques center students’ attention on meaningful cognitive
challenges and not so much on grammatical or phonological forms.
Opinion
exchange
¨ An opinion is usually a belief or feeling that might
not be founded on empirical data or that others could plausibly take issue
with. Opinion are difficult for students
to deal with at the beginning levels of proficincy, but by the intermediate
level, certain techniques can effectively include the exchange of various
opinions.
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