Think about interaction in the world outside the classroom. Are you able to predict every aspect of a communicative event?
OK, your schema knowledge will help you – this is the mental store you have that is filled with past experiences and knowledge. You use schema knowledge to predict the kind of language you will hear at a train station – questions when buying a ticket, what a conductor says if a train were delayed, etc. But, even if schemata (the plural form of schema) help us predict the general content of interactions, we can’t use them to predict everything…otherwise there would be no need to actually interact!
To a certain extent then, authentic communication is inherently unpredictable. If we want interaction in our classrooms to be at least somewhat authentic, it follows that it too must be at least somewhat unpredictable.
This sounds easy, but can be surprisingly challenging to achieve!
To illustrate what I mean, here’s an example from a class I observed recently.
Context. A pre-intermediate class in a public junior high school in Ecuador. We’re going to focus on a find-someone-who activity that was used as a free practice activity at the end of the session. The class had focused on tag questions, and this activity attempted to get students using the target language. There were 20 students in the session, sat in a horseshoe, with a smartboard at the front. They stood up and moved around during this activity.
Here’s an extract from the handout the teacher used.
| Question | Name | Extra information |
|---|---|---|
| Cumbayá are your favourite soccer team, aren’t they? | ||
| You like to read books after class, don’t you? | ||
| La Carolina Park is your favourite place to relax, isn’t it? |
Here’s a reflection on that example.
Find someone who activities are common in English language teaching. Because students are standing up, moving around, and talking to one another, it’s easy to assume genuine interaction is going on. However, let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of this activity to see if that really is the case.
What happens in this example? One student, the interviewer, reads out yes-no questions, listens to answers, asks original follow up questions, and listens to those answers. What aspects of this activity are unpredictable? The answers and the follow-up question, right? But is the same true for the opening tag question? No – the students are given the same questions to ask each other, so they know what they will be asked. It’s interesting to note that even though this activity was designed to elicit tag questions, there are no opportunities for learners to use the target language freely (the follow-up questions are likely to be wh-questions). So yes, this may be free practice, but it is not free practice of the target language.
When I raised this observation with the teacher after the lesson, he reflected that even though there was talking and the students were engaged, there had been little real interaction. He made some fantastic suggestions on how this activity could be improved.
- Give students different questions so they need to listen to one another.
- Give students topics, soccer and La Carolina Park for example, but have learners make their own questions.
- Get students to write their own questions in pairs, then ask them to other classmates.
Can you see how each of these solutions promotes more meaningful interaction? The interviewee now has to listen to a question in order to answer it. So which of these ideas is best? Well, it depends on how much control you want. Number 1 is very controlled, as it gives the target language to the students. So, even though there would be more meaningful interaction, it wouldn’t really involve any free practice of tag questions. Numbers 2 and 3 are likely to be much more effective. Both the questions and the answers are unpredictable. This would result in more meaningful interaction and effectively elicit student knowledge of the target language.
Over the years, I’ve found the following graph useful. I adapted this from a book by Tony Wright (1987). The figure helps me, and I hope you as well, evaluate how an activity promotes unpredictable student-student interaction..
Ideally, for free practice (and much of our classes really) we need to aim for the bottom-right, section A. That means students interact with each other in unpredictable ways. The changes the teacher in the example suggested would have moved the interaction stimulated by the activity from B to A. As we can see, those changes, although seemingly quite small, would have had a dramatic impact. It would have been much more student-centred and communicative.
Here are two strategies to help development
Over the next two weeks, think about this graph and reflect on your teaching.
- Are your classes largely in quadrant C (e.g., students reading a dialogue out loud or a teacher starting each lesson with the same series of questions), D (e.g., a lecture), B (e.g., find-someone-who with the questions provided), or is there real communication with unpredictable student-student interaction (A).
- Think about what small changes you can make to your teaching materials and lesson design to make you class a site of real, meaningful communication.
That’s all for this edition. Happy teaching and let me know what you think and how you get on in the comments on on social media.
Until next time,
Sam
Thanks for sharing this! It really made me think about how I structure interaction in class. I love the idea of giving students more freedom to ask their own questions, it makes everything feel more real. Definitely inspired to try this in lessons for my dissertation.
I have two questions:
1- Do you think giving students full freedom to create their own questions might overwhelm some of them? How should they we balance support and independence?
2- how would we adapt this approach for online classes where movement and spontaneous interaction are harder to manage?
Glad it resonated with you. These are two good questions. I think we need to vary the amount of control given the level/age of the learners and the purpose of the activity. It was interesting that the teacher I talked to suggested having students make questions in pairs so they could support one another…that seems a very sensible approach. I suppose with breakout rooms it might be possible and perhaps those spaces where avatars wander about and you can make groups spontaneously…as ever, we need the platform to support the approach (and vice versa).
Thank you for your explanation.