Interactive Language Teaching

Interactive Language Teaching

What is interaction?

Interaction is an important word for language teachers. In the era of communicative language teaching, interaction is, in fact, the heart of communication; it is what communication is all about. Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or people resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other.

Interactive Principles

1. Automaticity:

Interaction is best accomplished when focal attention is on meaning and messages and not on grammar and other linguistic forms.

1. 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.

1. Strategic investment:

Interaction requires the use of strategic language competence both to make certain decisions on how to say or write or interpret language.

1. Risk-taking:

Interaction requires a certain degree of failing to produce intended meaning, of failing to interpret intended meaning, of being laughed at, of being shunned or rejected. The rewards of course are great and worth the risks.

1. The language-culture connection:

The cultural loading of interactive speech as well as writing requires that interlocutors be thoroughly versed in the cultural nuances of language.

1. Interlanguage:

The complexity of interaction entails a long developmental process of acquisition. Numerous errors of production and comprehension will be a part of this development. And the role of teachers’ feedback is crucial to the developmental process.

1. Communicative competence:

All of elements of communicative competence (grammatical, pragmatic, strategic) are involved in human interaction. All aspects must work together for successful communication to take place.

1. Roles of the Interactive Teacher

Teachers can play many roles in the course of teaching:

. The teacher as controller

A role that is sometimes expected in traditional educational institutions is that of “master” controller. Master controllers determine what the students do, when they should speak, and what language forms they should use. But for interaction to take place, the teacher must create a climate in which spontaneity can thrive, in which unrehearsed language can be performed.

Nevertheless, even in the most cooperative of interactive classrooms, the teacher must maintain some control simply to organize the class hour.

. The teacher as director

Some interactive classroom time the teacher is like a conductor of an orchestra or a director of a drama. As students engage in either rehearsed or spontaneous language performance, it is teacher’s job to keep the process flowing smoothly and efficiently. The ultimate motive of such direction, of course, must always be to enable students eventually to engage in the real-life drama of improvisation as each communicative events brings its own uniqueness.

.The teacher as manager

This metaphor captures the teacher’s role as one who plans lessons and modules and courses, one who structures the larger, longer segments of classroom time, but who then allows each individual player to be creative within those parameters.

. The teacher as facilitator

The facilitating role requires that you step away from the managerial or directive role and allow students, with your guidance and gentle prodding here and there, to find their own pathways to success. A facilitator allows students to discover language through using it pragmatically rather than telling them about language.

. The teacher as resource

Here the teacher takes the least directive role. In fact, the student takes the initiative to come to him/her.(You are there for advice and counsel when the student seeks it. But there are appropriate times when you can literally take a back seat and allow the students to proceed with their own linguistic development).