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.

ESSAY: CHARACTERICTICS OF YOUNG LEARNERS

Many have agreed that English is such an important subject since it is used to communicate globally. It has been taught in every level of learners, even in primary level. People believe that teaching English in the early age has many advantages because young learners still have flexible minds and malleable tongues which help them learn English words easily. However, young learners are of course different with the adult ones in which the teacher should pay attention to their characteristics in order to make a better teaching and learning process.

Before we discuss about the characteristics, it is better to know the definition of young learners first. There are many definitions as stated by some experts. According to Purwaningsih, young learners are learners in elementary school aging nine to ten years old who are learning English as foreign language. While Etty Maryati Hoesein stated that young learners are the students of elementary school who are at grade four up to grade six. Their ages range from ten to twelve years of age. They have learned English for about one up to four years. From those definitions, we can conclude that young learners are children in the first six years of formal education, from the age six to twelve. It is because the lower limit of six roughly corresponds to the start of formal schooling in many countries, while the upper age of twelve approximates to a time when many children have begun to experience significant cognitive and emotional changes.

Children are very special in which they have their own characteristics that differ them from adult. They may lack on experience, but they have great reasoning ability. Whenever they find new things, they will make a reason based on their background knowledge they have. Because they are inexperience, sometimes it will lead them on misconceptions. That is why the teacher should be aware to anticipate childrens’ confusion and recognize why children have difficulties grasping new ideas.

Teacher should conduct teaching and learning activities based on young learners’ characteristics. These characterictics influence their ways of thinking, their aptitude, their attitude, etc. There are so many experts who give a list of yong learners’ characterictics, hence I will write some of them below.

According to Clark (1990: 6-8), here are five characteristics of young learners:

1.      Children are developing conceptually: they develop their way of thinking from concrete to the  abstract thing.

2.      Children have no real linguistics, different from the adult learners that already have certain purpose in learning language, they learn subject what school provide for them.

3.      Children are still developing; common skill such as turn talking and the use of body language.

4.      Young children very egocentric, they tend to resolve around themselves.

5.      Children get bored easily.

Meanwhile, Halliwel (1992: 3-5) stated that children are already very good in interpreting meaning without necessarily understanding the individual word, children already have great skill in using limited language creativity, children frequently learn indirectly rather than directly, children take good pleasure in finding and creating fun in what they do, and children have a ready imagination.

Brumfit (1997: v) gives a list of the characteristics which young learners share:

1. Young learners are only just beginning their schooling, so that teachers have a    major opportunity to mould their expectations of life in school.
2.  As a group, they are potentially more differentiated than secondary or adult learners, for they are closer to their varied home cultures, and new to the conformity increasingly imposed across cultural grouping by the school.
3. They tend to be keen and enthusiastic learners,
4. Their learning can be closely linked with their development of ideas and concepts, because it is so close to their initial experiences of formal schooling.
5. They need physical movement and activity as much as stimulation for their thinking, and the closer together these can be the better.

Young learners’ characteristics are also divided into three sides:

1.    Physical side

·      The physical world of young children is dominant and the understanding comes through hands, eyes and ears.

·      They perform physical activity in many ways; coloring, drawing and writing.

·      They are at the developing stage (critical period) in which they are capable of attaining native like second language because their organ of speech is still plastic.

2.    Social side

·      They are happy playing ad working in the company of others.

·      They are always aware of themselves in relation to others.

3.    Psychological side

·      They have short concentration span.

·      They are free of prejudice.

·      They get bored easily.

·      They are forgetful.

·      They like imitating.

·      They have high curiosity.

·      They are risk taker.

In conclusion, teacher should learn the characteristic of young learners whom she teaches because it will determine the success of language learning. By considering the characteristics that have mentioned above, hopefully teacher is able to choose the best teaching strategies so that young learners can understand the material well.

REFERENCES

Brumfit (1997) Young Learners Characteristics (TEYL/TMYL). (online) (http://peni.staff.uns.ac.id/2008/10/10/young-learner-characteristics/ accessed on March 9 , 2014).

Clark, J (1990) Teaching children: is it different? JET October 1990.

Halliwell, Susan (1992) Teaching English in the Primary Classroom. London: Longman.

Lecturing by Mrs. Dra.  Diani Nurhayati M.Pd. on March 10, 2014.

Prasetia, Cicik (2011) Teaching English for Young Learners. (online) (http://cicikprasetia.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/teaching-english-for-young-learners/ accessed on March 9, 2014)

BOOK FOR ASSESSING SPEAKING AND WRITING

Process of teaching English cannot be separated with the so-called Assessment. It is the last process in which the data collection, synthesis, interpretation and information usage is used by the teacher to make decision about students' responses and performances both individual and groups of educational task. Assessment is also used to measure the students' knowledge and understanding about the material that has been taught.
Below, I give you two books about assessing skills; speaking and writing. Since those skills are performance skills, so they need more detailed assessment procedure and/or rubrics.

To download Assessing Speaking book, CLICK HERE.

To download Assessing Writing book, CLICK HERE.

Hope these books can help ^^

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