Interaction in Class

Hi everybody! 

How are the first days of the year going?

   Today we are going to talk about interaction in the classroom. It is known by everyone that lessons have traditionally been a space where the teacher talks and the students listen. But nowadays, we are learning new methodologies that allow us to improve this system in order to help our students to achieve their goals. This is where interaction takes place and I’m going to explain how I would like to use it in the classroom.

   The level I’m going to choose is ESO, but it is not so important to decide the specific course we are teaching because we can use this methodology indistinctively, just we will need to adapt it to the content and our student’s ages.

   I would like to teach my subject (Spanish Language and Literature) using the communicative approach because it implies interaction. I would like them to use all the language areas (listening, writing, speaking and reading) to be efficient language users. To achieve that, they will need to interact with us, the teachers, but also with their peers or groups.

   This kind of methodology allows using different activities, such as games, discussions and debates, workshops, presentations, correction and feedback, role playing, and so on. From all of them, I would like to highlight discussions and debates and corrections and feedback.

Imagining that we are teaching the different kind of texts that exist (instructive, narrative, descriptive…), we can use interaction encouraging them to collaborate between the groups to recreate the characteristics that these texts should have, and creating one text by themselves.

   For example, when learning instructive texts, we can create a debate where they discuss which the characteristics are. Then, write a brain storming in the blackboard, and correct them. We can ask as well which instructive texts they know, to add the new information to the previous one they already had. After that, we can encourage them to elaborate their own instructions, but once they are finished, they should give the instructions to their peer. The student should be able to follow them to check if they are well-done. For instance, if the student 1 wrote the instructions to create a paper plane, the student 2 should be able to follow them until the plane is done. If the plane is not correctly done, student 1 should correct the instructions. Here we are using interaction with the teacher and with the classmates, significant learning and correction and feedback. 

   The advantages of this methodology are many. If everything goes okay, they learn playing, they find that they already knew something about it and that now the know more, and they use the language to communicate, so they practise speaking skills. In addition, since they are checking if their writing was useful, they learn the importance of the content.

   The disadvantages are that, because they are talking and moving, it could be easier to those students that lack concentration to get dispersed. Moreover, shy students could find these activities quite challenging. And the last one, these activities imply creativity and students sometimes can find difficult to express it, so it could be convenient to have some patterns for them.