CLASSROOM INTERACTION

A.   Definition of Classroom Interaction

            Classroom interaction as a form of institutional talk is locally managed but cooperatively constructed speech exchange system (Markee & Kasper, 2004). It is one of the platforms where any reality about classroom phenomena is produced and can be observed at the same time.

            The term classroom interaction refers to the interaction between teacher and learners in the classrooms.  According to Brown (2001), interaction is at the heart of communicative competence. When a learner interacts with another learner he/she receives input and produces output.

            Classroom interaction is considered a productive teaching technique. According to Allwright (1984), it is the process whereby classroom language learning is managed. In the classroom interaction, both the teachers and students can create the learning opportunities, which motivate the students’ interest and potential to communicate with others.

            In conclusion, classroom interaction is all interactions between the participants in the learning process; the teacher and students, who influence each other to create a good classroom environment in order to reach the learning’s goal.

B.   Purpose of Classroom Interaction

            The purposes of classroom interaction are as follow:

•         This type of interaction helps the learners to identify their own learning methods.

•         This interaction will guide the learners to communicate with their peers easily and will give them an exposure to the vase genres of language learning.

•         It will help the learner to come face to face with the various types of interaction that can take place inside the classroom.

•         Classroom Interaction aims at meaningful communication among the students in their target language.

•         It also aims at probing into the learner’s prior learning ability and his way of conceptualizing facts and ideas.

•         This practice will help the teacher to have a detailed study of the nature and the frequency of student interaction inside the classroom.

C.        Example of Classroom Interaction

            D.        Types of Classroom Interaction

            Here are the types of classroom interaction:

a.     Collaborative Learning

       Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. Unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another’s resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work, etc.). Collaborative learning is a method of teaching and learning in which students team together to explore a significant question or create a meaningful project. A group of students discussing a lecture or students from different schools working together over the Internet on a shared assignment are both examples of collaborative learning.

b.   Discussions

Discussions can be an excellent strategy for enhancing student motivation, fostering intellectual agility, and encouraging democratic habits. They create opportunities for students to practice and sharpen a number of skills, including the ability to articulate and defend positions, consider different points of view, and enlist and evaluate evidence.

c.    Debate

Engaging in collaborative discourse and argumentation enhances student’s conceptual understandings and refines their reasoning abilities.  Stage a debate exploiting an arguable divide in the day’s materials.  Give teams time to prepare, and then put them into argument with a team focused on representing an opposing viewpoint.  Advantages include practice in using the language of the discipline and crafting evidence-based reasoning in their arguments.

d.   Reading Aloud

      Reading aloud is a classroom activity in which one person is reading while others listen. Reading aloud may be performed by the teacher or student. Reading aloud may be performed by a single person or by a group taking turns. This form of highly structured classroom interaction allows all students to be focused at exactly the same point in a reading. This allows students to easily focus on vocabulary and pronunciation.

d.   Story-telling

      Storytelling is the sharing of stories and events through words, sounds and visual images. An effective storyteller captures the attention of listeners and accomplishes the goal of telling the story, which may be to entertain, convey information, teach an important life lesson, or persuade listeners to take action of some kind. Storytelling techniques may incorporate a combination of tone usage, animated sounds and gestures, and digital tools. Storytelling can be a powerful tool in the classroom. It is often helpful to begin with the teacher playing the role of storyteller or by inviting a professional storyteller into the classroom. But it is when the students become the storytellers that storytelling makes its greatest contribution to the classroom.

e.    Conversation with learners

      Classroom conversation is a form of classroom interaction in which students in the class discuss a given topic. The conversation may be held across the whole class or in smaller groups. Conversation is an important form of classroom interaction because it helps students develop their language skills. In a conversation, students may apply the skills and knowledge they have acquired in the class, making classroom conversation a practical form of interaction.

f.    Role Play

     Role-playing is an activity in which students take on given or chosen roles and act out a scene with others. This form of interaction lends itself to almost any situation, and the only restriction is a student's imagination. Role-playing allows students to demonstrate their creativity and knowledge about their roles, and it allows students to think outside of the constraints of the classroom and consider how they might apply the learned material to the real world. This form of interaction can integrate different subjects into one activity.

g.   Question-and-Answer

      Question-and-answer is a traditional form of classroom interaction in which a teacher or student explains and poses a question for the other. Questions asked by the teacher are usually for the purpose of assessment, while questions asked by the students are usually for obtaining new information. The Socratic method is also a form of question-and-answer interaction. The Socratic method is a form of asking questions with the intent of leading students to discover the answer themselves. Question-and-answer as a form of interactive learning allows students to have a large influence on the agenda of the classroom, because it allows them to freely express their thoughts and feelings.

h.   Jigsaw

      Jigsaw is a strategy that emphasizes cooperative learning by providing students an opportunity to actively help each other build comprehension. These can be done in one of two ways – either each team works on completing a different portion of the assignment and then contributes their knowledge to the class as a whole, or within each group, one student is assigned to a portion of the assignment (the jigsaw comes from the bringing together the various ideas at the end of the activity to produce a solution to the problem).  In a jigsaw the activity must be divided into several equal parts, each of which is necessary to solving a problem, or answering a question.  Example activities include implementing experiments, small research projects, analyzing and comparing datasets, and working with professional literature. The advantages of the jigsaw include the ability to explore substantive problems or readings, the engagement of all students with the material and in the process of working together, learning from each other, and sharing and critical analyzing a diversity of ideas. 

E.        Teaching Steps using Jigsaw

            According to our group, the most interesting type of classroom interaction is jigsaw. It gives the students some advantages as follow:

• It is an efficient way to learn the material.

• Builds a depth of knowledge

• Discloses a student's own understanding and resolves misunderstanding

• Builds on conceptual understanding

• Develops teamwork and cooperative working skills

           

            Below are the teaching steps using jigsaw:

1. Divide students into 5- or 6-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, and ability.
2. Appoint one student from each group as the leader. Initially, this person should be the most mature student in the group.
3. Divide the day's lesson into 5-6 segments. For example, if you want history students to learn about Eleanor Roosevelt, you might divide a short biography of her into stand-alone segments on: (1) Her childhood, (2) Her family life with Franklin and their children, (3) Her life after Franklin contracted polio, (4) Her work in the White House as First Lady, and (5) Her life and work after Franklin's death.
4. Assign each student to learn one segment, making sure students have direct access only to their own segment.
5. Give students time to read over their segment at least twice and become familiar with it. There is no need for them to memorize it.
6. Form temporary "expert groups" by having one student from each jigsaw group join other students assigned to the same segment. Give students in these expert groups time to discuss the main points of their segment and to rehearse the presentations they will make to their jigsaw group.
7. Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.
8. Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group. Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.
9. Float from group to group, observing the process. If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is dominating or disruptive), make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by whispering an instruction on how to intervene, until the leader gets the hang of it.
10. At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material so that students quickly come to realize that these sessions are not just fun and games but really count.

REFERENCES

Allwright, R. L. 1984. The Importance of Interaction in Classroom Language Learning.    Apllied Linguistics 5 (2).

Brown, H. D. 2001. Teaching by Principle: an Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. (2^nd Ed.). NY: Pearson Education.

Markee, N. & Kasper, G. 2004. Classroom Talks: an Introduction. The Modern Language            Journal 88 (4).

Verial, Damon. Types of Classroom Interaction. Available on           http://ehow.com/m/info_7854839_types-classroom-interaction.html. Assessed on April 27, 2014.

ARTICLE RESPONSE FORM

Extensive reading is a type of reading for advance level. It doesn't try to get the meaning of a long text, but rather the meaning of its context. We can do it by re-reading the text for several times, taking note on important points, and then making a response.
Here is the example of response form of a research article.

ARTICLE RESPONSE FORM

Article title          : College Students’ Use of Affective and Social Language Learning   Strategies: A Classroom-Based Research.

Author                 : Marites B. Querol

Publisher              : Time Taylor International (Philippine ESL Journal, Vol.5)

Date published    : July 2010

Genre                   : Research article

Why did you decide to read this article?

Because I wanted to know more about language learning strategies, especially Affective Language Learning Strategies (ALLS) and Social Language Learning Strategies (SLLS), which might be able to be implemented in the classroom. I was also curious whether or not these strategies were used by the college students in Philippine and how the relationship between these two.

Were you glad that you decided to read it? Explain.

Yes, I was. After reading it, I got new knowledge that there were some strategies in learning a language that were very helpful in understanding the material better.  These strategies were very important for the successful of language learning.

What did you like best about this article?

This article provided tables as research findings which helped the readers to understand the given information more. The results were also completed with explanation and description so the information could be really convincing.

What did you like least?

The researcher didn’t give further explanation and example about the relationship between ALLS and SLLS, so the information seemed didn’t complete yet.

Would you recommend this article to a friend? Explain.

Yes, I would.  As I stated before that this article gave me new information about language learning strategies, as students majoring in English, these were essential to increase our comprehension of the language we learned. I hoped that this article would also help my friend both in processing new information and performing task.

On a scale of 1-10, how difficult was this article for you?

I thought the difficulty degree was 5 - intermediate. It was because although there were some unfamiliar words, but overall I could still understand this article.

And here is the summary...

SUMMARY

                 In learning a language, every learner used learning strategies to process the given information and do the tasks. This made some researchers conducted a study to investigate the use of Language Learning Strategies (LLS) among the students. Most of these studies were based on the idea that language was mean of communication in which the speaker and listener understood each other. Oxford (1990) divided the strategies into two; direct strategies consisting of memory strategies, cognitive strategies and compensation strategies, and indirect strategies which covered metacognitive strategies, affective strategies and social strategies. Current research result showed that the collaboration of two or more strategies would result better in learning. Furthermore, LLS was not only used in language learning, but also in science and technology. However, among these strategies, Affective Language Learning Strategies (ALLS), which focused on the learners’ feeling, and Social Language Learning Strategies (SLLS), which related to the social relationship with others, were less used. This became the basic reason on why this research was conducted. The researcher wanted to find out whether or not ALLS and SLLS were used by the college students in Philippine and the relationship between the two strategies. By using descriptive design, researcher observed 24 English college students of private university in Philippine and gave them questionnaires as the research instrument. Later on, the gathered data would be analyzed using descriptive statistic and Pearson correlation. The result showed that the students answered the given questionnaires in varied ways, but it could be concluded that both ALLS and SLLS were actually used by the students. But because every student had his/her own perspectives and preferences, so the strategies used were also different. The data also showed that there was a correlation between ALLS and SLLS as they expected to be observed as one. Since these strategies were still not optimized by the students, it was recommended to be integrated as part of the language skills. Learning strategy helped the learners to succeed on their language learning if it was used effectively. It could be done by training the students in using these strategies and also by popularizing them.

              

TEACHING PRACTICE USING AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD (ALM)

In language teaching, there are some methods that can be used by teacher to teach her/his students, e.g. Audio-Lingual Method, Grammar Translation Method, Suggestopedia, etc. Even though some of them may not be applied now, but it's important for us, as an English teacher, to know more about these methods as a reference or additional knowledge. Below is the example of the teaching practice using Audio-Lingual Method.

TEACHING PRACTICE

Topic                         : Likes and Dislikes

Subtopic                   : Hobby

Class/Semester        : VII / 2

Level                        : Junior High school

Technique                : Audio Lingual Method

Objectives:

1. The students are able to respond and express the expression of likes and dislikes about hobby.

2. The students are able to ask the clarification and give the respond inter-personally.

3. The students are able to communicative speak.

Procedures:

Stage 1

1. The teacher greets the students and checks the attendance list.

2. The teacher presents a new dialogue.

3. The teacher gives the model of each line of dialogue to be repeated by students.

4. The teacher stops repetition and uses backward build-up (expansion) drill to the difficult sentence.

5. The teacher practices the dialogue with students (teacher as Anas, students as Bela) and gets the boys to take Anas’ lines and the girls take Bela’s lines (repetition drill).

Stage 2

1. The teacher uses chain drill with some lines of the dialogue.

2. The teacher selects some pairs of students to perform the entire dialogue.

3. The teacher uses single-slot and multiple-slot substitution drill to drill language from dialogue.

Stage 3

1. The teacher asks the students to change an affirmative sentence into negative sentence and interrogative sentence (transformation drill).

2. The teacher uses question-and-answer drill by asking them some questions.

3. The teacher uses minimal pairs by giving some words which have similar pronunciation.

Stage 4

1. The students are asked to complete the entire dialogue.

2. The teacher introduces grammar game.

I also complete it with Students Worksheet, you can DOWNLOAD HERE