1

INTERACTIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Indawan Syahri

The Muhammadiyah University of Palembang

2

What is interaction?• Interaction is an important word for language

teachers.• Interaction is the heart of communication.

– Sending messages – receiving messages – interpreting messages – negotiating meaning – collaborating ----- communicative purposes

• Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or more people resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other.

3

Interactive Principles (1) • Automaticity

– True human interaction is best accomplished when focal attention is on meanings and messages and not on grammar and other linguistic forms.

– Students’ activities are managed in the form of controlled modes to automatic modes.

• Intrinsic motivation– As students become engaged with each other in speech acts

of fulfillment and self-actualization, their deepest drives are satisfied.

– They fully appreciate their own competence to use language, they can develop a system of self-reward.

4

Interactive Principles (2)

• Strategic investment– 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 communication pathways and block.

– The spontaneity of interactive discourse needs judicious use of numerous strategies for production and comprehension.

• Risk-taking– Interaction needs a certain degree of risk of failing to produce

intended meanings. Of being laughed at, of being shunned or rejected.

• The language-culture connection– The cultural loading of interactive in the speech as well as

writing needs that interlocutors be thoroughly versed in the cultural nuances of language

5

Interactive Principles (3)

• Interlanguage– The complexity of interaction entails a long

developmental process of acquisition.• Numerous errors• Teachers’ feedback

• Communicative competence– All elements of communicative competence (linguistic,

discourse, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, strategic) are involved in human interaction.

– All aspects must work together for successful communication to take place.

6

How to apply the interactive principles in classroom?

• The ELT practitioners should be aware of that they are the most important figures in classroom.

• They are the persons who are able to initiate and sustain the interaction.

• They should realize that they are not only as informants--giving knowledge, but they also have other strategic roles.

• So, what are their roles?

7

Roles of the Interactive Teachers

Teacher’s roles

8

Teacher as controller

• Carefully project how a technique will proceed

• Map out the initial input to students• Specify the directions to be given• Gauge the timing of a technique• Maintain some control simply to organize

the class hour

9

Teacher as director

• The teacher is like a conductor of an orchestra or a director of drama.– To keep the process flowing smoothly and

efficiently.– To enable students eventually to engage in

the real-life drama of improvisation as each communicative event brings its own uniqueness.

10

Teacher as manager

• To plan lessons• To structure the classroom

– Group the students– Determine the activities

• To allow each individual student to be creative

11

Teacher as facilitator

• To facilitate the process of learning– Make learning easier– Help learners to clear away roadblock– Find shortcuts– Negotiate rough terrain– Allow learners to discover language through using

rather than telling the usage

12

Teacher as resource

• Learners take the initiative to come to the teacher.

• Teachers give advice and counsel.

13

Questioning Strategies– functions of appropriate questions

1. Giving students the impetus and opportunity to produce comfortably language without having to risk initiating language themselves

2. Serving to initiate a chain reaction of student interaction among themselves

3. Giving the instructor immediate feedback about students comprehension

4. Providing students with opportunities to find out what they think by hearing what they say.

(adapted from Christenbury & Kelly, 1983; Kinsella, 1991)

14

Seven Categories of Question: from Display to Referential questions

1. Knowledge questions: Eliciting factual answers, testing recall and recognition of information (e.g. of question words: tell, list, identify, select, name, point out, label, reproduce)

2. Comprehension questions: Interpreting, extrapolating (e.g., state in your words, define, explain, summarize)

3. Application questions: Applying information (e.g., demonstrate how, use the data to solve, illustrate how, show how, apply, construct)

4. Inferential questions: Forming conclusions (e.g., how?, why?, what did___ mean by?)

5. Analysis questions: Breaking down into parts, relating parts to the whole (e.g. distinguish, diagram, chart, plan, classify, outline, differentiate)

6. Synthesis questions: Combining elements into a new pattern (e.g., hypothesize, build, solve, design, develop)

7. Evaluative questions: Making a judgment of good or bad, right or wrong, according to some sets of criteria, and stating why (e.g., evaluate, rate, defend, dispute, decide which, choose why)

15

How to sustain interaction in language classroom?

Interaction requires two or more people.– How does interaction between two or more people

possibly occur? – In what activities students interact with others?

Group work activities****

Reviews:Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or more people resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other.

16

Advantages of Group Work

• Generating interactive language.• Offering an embracing affecting climate.• Promoting learner responsibility and

autonomy.• A step toward individualizing instruction.

17

How do teachers group students?

• To select students in advance of the class based on personal characteristic or abilities and experience

• Students’ own decisions about what group to join• To randomly group students,

– by having students count off “One, two, three, four, …” and having all one’s form a group, two’s another, and so on.

– Students could also be given pieces of paper with color dots. All the red dots form a group, blue dots another, yellow dots another.

• Randomly pair up through a pairing technique, – By having each student find the person with another half of a

picture.

18

THANK YOU.