Филологические
науки/ 1.Методика преподавания языка и литературы.
Семенишена Н.А.
Российский государственный социальный университет,
филиал в г. Наро-Фоминске
The role of classroom interaction
and communicative activity in enhancing the effectiveness of learning a foreign language
Classroom
interaction.
Classroom
interaction is the general term, for what goes on between the people in the
classroom, particularly when it involves language. In traditional classrooms,
most interaction is initiated by the teacher, and learners either respond
individually, or in unison. Teacher-centred interaction of this kind is
associated with transmissive teaching, such as a lecture or presentation, where
the teacher transmits the content of the lesson to the learners. In order to
increase the amount of student involvement and interaction, teacher-learner
interaction is often combined with pairwork and groupwork, where learners
interact among themselves in pairs or small groups. Other kinds of interaction
include mingling or milling. Pairwork and groupwork are associated with a more
learner-centred approach. Rather than passively receiving the lesson content,
the learners are actively engaged in using language and discovering things for
themselves. The value of pairwork and groupwork has been reinforced by the
belief that interaction facilitates language learning. Some would go as far as
to say that it is all that is required.
The
potential for classroom interaction is obviously constrained by such factors as
the number of students, the size of the room, the furniture, and the purpose or
type of activity. Not all activities lend themselves to pairwork or groupwork.
Some activities, such as reading, are best done as individual work. On the
other hand, listening activities (such as listening to an audio recording, or
to the teacher) favour a whole class format, as do grammar presentations. The
whole class is also an appropriate form of organization when reviewing the
results of an activity, as, for example, when spokespersons from each group are
reporting on the results of a discussion or survey.
The
success of any classroom interaction will also depend on the extent to which
the learners know what they are meant to be doing and why, which in turn
depends on how clearly and efficiently the interaction has been set up.
Pairwork and groupwork can be a complete waste of time if learners are neither
properly prepared for it, nor sure of its purpose or outcome.
Finally, the
success of pairwork and groupwork will depend on the kind of group dynamics
that have been established. Do the students know one another? Are they happy
working together? Do they mind working without constant teacher supervision?
Establishing a productive classroom dynamic may involve making decisions as to
who works with whom. It may also mean deliberately staging the introduction of
different kinds of interactions, starting off with the more controlled,
teacher-led interactions before, over time, allowing learners to work in
pairs and finally in groups.
Communicative
activity.
A
communicative activity is one in which real communication occurs. Communicative activities belong to that
generation of classroom activities that emerged in response to the need for a
more communicative approach in the
teaching of second languages. (In their more evolved form as tasks,
communicative activities are central to task-based learning). They attempt to import into a practice activity the
key features of real-life communication.
These
are:
• purposefulness: speakers
are motivated by
a communicative goal (such as getting information, making a request,
giving instructions) and not simply by the need to display the correct use of
language for its own sake
• reciprocity:
to achieve a purpose, speakers need to interact, and there is as much need to
listen as to speak
• negotiation:
following from the above, they may need to check and repair the communication
in order to be understood by each other
• unpredictability: neither
the process, nor the outcome, nor the language used in the
exchange, is entirely predictable
• heterogeneity:
participants can use any communicative means at their disposal; in
other words, they are not restricted to
the use of a pre-specified grammar item.
And, in the case of
spoken language in particular:
• synchronicity:
the exchange takes place in real time
The
best known communicative activity is the information gap activity. Here, the information
necessary to complete the task is either in the possession of just one of the
participants, or distributed among them.
In order to achieve the goal of the task, therefore, the learners have
to share the information that they have. For example, in a describe-and-draw
activity, one student has a picture which is hidden from his or her partner.
The task is for that student to describe the picture so that the partner can
accurately draw it. In a spot-the-difference task, both students of a pair have
pictures (or texts) that are the same apart from some minor details. The goal
is to identify these differences. In a jigsaw activity, each member of a group
has different information. One might have a bus timetable, another a map, and
another a list of hotels. They have to share this information in order to plan
a weekend break together. Information gap activities have been criticized on the grounds that they lack authenticity. Nor
are information gap activities always as productive as might be wished:
unsupervised, learners may resort to
communication strategies in order to simplify the task. A more exploitable
information gap, arguably, is the one that exists between the learners
themselves, i.e., what they don't know - but might like to know - about one
another.
Bibliography:
1.
Scott Thornbury. An A-Z of ELT – Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2006.
2.
Hadfield Jill. Communication Games. - Longman, 2005.
3.
Baruch Schwarz, Tommy Dreyfus and Rina Hershkowitz. Transformation of
Knowledge through Classroom Interaction – Routledge, 2009.