Text types: Texts for social interaction

Classroom interaction

Using classroom interaction to help students learn English

Students learn another language more easily if they take part in spoken interactions which give them opportunities to:

	produce and practise language themselves
	hear and see language they understand
	solve communication problems
	interact with each other

Teachers can help their students learn English by using classroom interactions which provide students with opportunities do these things. This can be done by interrupting and expanding the basic three-turn Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern in order to track what students are saying. 

For more information about tracking in social interactions, click on Texts for social interaction: Overview in the menu on the left, and look at the Tell me more pages.

Giving students opportunities to produce and practise language themselves

Listening alone is not enough to learn another language. When students take part in classroom interactions in purposeful ways, they have opportunities to produce and practise language themselves. 

Teachers give students opportunities to produce and practise language by asking Questions. In classroom interactions teachers ask Questions so students can display what they have learned. Open-ended Questions give students the greatest opportunity to produce and practise language themselves because they are free to choose what aspect of the topic they will talk about.

The student's Response is sometimes called output.

If a student gives a Response which is hard to understand, the teacher can help by interrupting in order to track what the student is saying. These interruptions give students an opportunity to re-word what they have said in a more effective way. 

For an analysis of an interaction between a teacher and a student learning about magnets which illustrates the above points, click here:

For more information about interruptions which keep track of what people are saying, click on Texts for social interaction: Overview in the menu on the left, and look at the Tell me more pages.

Giving students opportunities to hear and see language they understand

The language that students hear and see is sometimes called input. Students must be able to understand input if they are going to learn from it. For this reason, teachers often simplify input so students can understand it, but there are many other effective ways to help students understand, for example:

	using gestures and demonstrations
	saying the same thing in different ways
	using pictures
	presenting new language in a context which helps to explain its meaning

For an analysis of an interaction in which new language is presented in a context which helps to explain its meaning, click here:

Repeating, recasting and reformulating meanings in different ways is sometimes called message redundancy. When teachers use English with a lot of redundancy, students are able to understand the language more easily.

Giving students opportunities to solve communication problems

Giving students opportunities to solve communication problems also helps them learn more language.

For an analysis of an interaction in which students solve a communication problem, click here:

We learn another language best when we interact with someone whose language level is a little higher than our own. For this reason students with different English levels should work in the same groups, but the language levels of the students in a group should not be too different. In the classroom interaction analysed above, one student knew a little more than the other but they were close enough for both students to participate in the interaction. The students did not give up and they did not become bored.

Giving students opportunities to interact with each other

When people learn another language, they use more language if they have opportunities to interact with equals. For this reason students should have many opportunities to interact with other students in English classrooms. Communicative language teaching activities give students opportunities to interact with each other.

One of the most common communicative language teaching activities are barrier games. A barrier game is played by two students. As the students play the game, they have to solve a problem. There is always an information gap, in other words each student has different information, but both students need all the information in order to solve the problem. Students should not be able to see each other's information so a 'barrier' is placed between them.

To find out more about communicative language activities see the Teaching Suggestions on the menu on the left.