Natural Interactions
Alexander Case, Korea
Alex Case has worked as a teacher and occasional teacher trainer and writer/ editor in Turkey, Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy, Japan, the UK and now Korea. He is Reviews Editor of TEFL.net and writes TEFLtastic blog: www.tefl.net/alexcase, his list of publications to be found at: www.tefl.net/alexcase/about/publications-links/
E-mail: alexcase@hotmail.com
Has one of your students ever ‘spoilt’ one of your nicely set up classroom activities by:
- listening into the other groups when they seem to be saying something more interesting than theirs?
- ‘finding someone who’ by standing in the middle of the class and shouting “Who’s got three brothers?” rather than walking round and mingling?
- saying to their partner “Okay, we’ll take your top five choices and my bottom five. Finished!”?
All these examples are based on experiences I have had in the classroom. My reaction in the first year or two of teaching was to picture my boss’s face if something like this had happened during an observed lesson and to start sweating. I then started putting together a set of detailed rules for each activity to make them ‘go right’ under all possible eventualities.
As time has gone on my approach to these unplanned for interactions has changed, however. Group discussion slowly drifting into a whole class discussion (and occasionally drifting back into groups) has started to seem more natural and pleasant than ‘feedback as a class’ after the allotted amount of time for pairwork. It’s also made me think that there is something unnatural about any classroom interaction that needs a list of 10 or more rules to make it work.
Here are some more examples of thing people only do in the language learning classroom I would also put into that ‘unnatural’ category, and some more ‘natural’ alternatives that are more like things we do everyday in ‘real life’:
| Unnatural interactions |
Natural interactions |
| Students all walk around the class and quickly ask each other questions to ‘Find someone who (has been to Miami etc.)’ as quickly as possible |
People mingle randomly, starting and finishing conversations and guiding them naturally towards what they want to talk about- like a cocktail party. |
| Students moving their chairs into a circle to face each other |
Speaking to people across a table and on either side, like at a dinner party |
| Sitting in chairs with flaps, with the class arranged in a horseshoe shape with the teacher at the front |
Sitting round a single table, like a business meeting, or around clustered tables, like a primary school/ art class |
| Writing something/ doing an exercise/ doing a reading in pairs |
Students divide the task up between themselves, then get the answers from each other and double check anything they are not sure about- like teamwork in a company or a factory |
| Reporting back what your group’s opinion is to the whole class |
Reporting back your ‘findings’ or specialist information, like in a business meeting |
| The teacher stops all the groups when one finishes |
The teacher starts talking to the group that finishes first, and let other groups join in naturally as they finish/ become interested in the discussion |
| Whole class free discussion |
A parliamentary debate |
| Listening to a tape and doing sentence completion tasks |
Listening to a lecture and taking notes to use for something later |
| Watching a short extract of a film and completing a worksheet |
Watching TV together and making sarcastic comments or helping each other to understand what is going on |
| Filling gaps in song |
Choosing a song to match your mood and then reading the lyrics to understand what it is really about |
| Pretending you’re on the phone |
Using a telephone |
| Running dictations |
Passing a message onto someone |
| Pairwork shouting dictation |
Shouting “Does anyone here have a car with registration number…?” or “Who wants a…?” to get people’s attention |
| Discussing something together in rigid pairs, ignoring what’s going on next to you |
Working in a team of two people in competition with others |
I’m not saying that if an interaction is not natural it can’t be used, any more than the authenticity of a text is the only thing to take into account when choosing what your students will read. I do think that the naturalness of interactions should be taken into account however, especially as it can mirror situations that students may find themselves using English in outside the classroom. Everyone who has studied a language in the classroom has had the experience of trying to use that language outside and being surprised at how much more difficult it is. If we relax the rules a little and make sure that there is the noise, unpredictability and variety of interactions of the outside world, maybe we can reduce that effect.
As the students are not generally actually mingling at a cocktail party in our classes, these natural interactions can actually take more setting up than the traditional TEFL ones. For mingling, students will need the language of starting and politely finishing conversations (e.g. ‘I’m sorry, but I really must speak to…’). For speaking across the table, they may need polite interruption language (‘I couldn’t help overhearing…’). If groups listening in to each other is something you want to encourage, you may find that students are so well ‘trained’ just to work in pairs that the activity needs to be set up with this specifically in mind. For example, you could set up two groups playing Taboo (defining words without using 5 particular related words on a list) and allow the people listening in to answer either of the two people speaking. The times I have tried this in class the results have been, I must admit, mixed, but the fact that it seems more difficult than doing another controlled groupwork activity is another reason I would give for concentrating more on the naturalness of reactions- the chance to be surprised and challenged in the classroom again.
Please check the Dealing with Difficult Learners course at Pilgrims website.
|
