INTERACTIVE LANGUAGE

TEACHING

Indawan Syahri
The Muhammadiyah University of Palembang

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 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.
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 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.

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 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
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 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.
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 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?
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Roles of the Interactive Teachers
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 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

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 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.

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 Teacher as manager
• To plan lessons
• To structure the classroom
– Group the students
– Determine the activities
• To allow each individual student to be
creative

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 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

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 Teacher as resource
• Learners take the initiative to come to
the teacher.
• Teachers give advice and counsel.

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 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)

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 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)
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 How to sustain interaction in language
classroom?
Reviews:
Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts,
feelings, or ideas between two or more people
resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other.

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****
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 Advantages of Group Work

• Generating interactive language.

• Offering an embracing affecting climate.
• Promoting learner responsibility and
autonomy.
• A step toward individualizing instruction.

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 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.

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THANK
YOU.
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