Chapter a role of interaction in teaching process

CHAPTER 1.
A ROLE OF INTERACTION IN TEACHING PROCESS
1.1 The Process of teachers’ interaction in teaching and learning

In recent studies seeking to identify the ways in which the structure of

Teaching system contributes to the perpetuation of social inequality, one of the most provocative findings has been that larger patterns of stratification in terms of race and class are reproduced in the organization of school environments. Research conducted during the last decade has shown that teachers consistently differ in their treatment of students in interactions with learners, and further, that within the same classrooms, teacher interaction plays an important role in the assignment of students’ ability, understanding and knowledge among the groups. Additionally, detailed study of classroom reading groups has shown that much less time is devoted to the actual task of interacting while reading in low-ranked groups that non-verbal interaction in these groups is tightly structured and, most importantly, that the process of successful and unsuccessful learning is collaborative. Because all learning results in part from social interaction, a major goal in the studies reported on was to see whether methods of conversational analysis could be profitably applied to the study of classroom interaction. One reason for the focus on conversation was that several recent studies of early language learning have shown that mothers' conversational strategies with children affects the rate of initial language acquisition; that is, social interaction influences the acquisition of basic linguistic competence. Another reason, more directly related to the question of classroom learning, is the accumulating evidence that the quality of conversational exchanges between teachers and students influences student achievement.
Much research in the process-product paradigm of educational psychology has
shown that there are significant problems faced in trying to relate teaching strategies to achievement outcomes. It has proven difficult to specify what aspects of classroom interaction contribute to improved achievement. This impasse is due in part, however, to the measures used to describe interaction. Earlier studies tended to define the teacher's behavior in relative isolation, using gross affective categories and paying little attention to student behavior. Later research, taking a different tack, has attempted to define teacher behavior in terms of the cognitive tasks it poses and with respect to the student behavior to which it is a response. This subsequent research has been more successful in showing correlations between instructional strategies and reading achievement outcomes. In particular, it indicates that teacher uptake of students' answers is a complex but important interactive variable which correlates positively with reading achievement. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of verbal interaction in a first grade classroom in an inner-city Chicago school. In the California school, it was found that children from different sociocultural backgrounds come to school with different strategies for the use of prosody, both in oral narratives and oral reading. Where the strategies differed from those of the instructor, negative evaluations of ability were formed and access to reading instruction was lessened. In the Chicago school, where students were from the same ethnic background and similar socio-economic backgrounds, it was found that low-ranked students were given less and different instruction than their high-ranked counterparts. In both studies reading lessons were treated as a series of student-teacher exchanges and my analysis attempted to identify the causes for the differences in the teachers' responses to students' reading performances.
This study investigated the process of tertiary English language teaching and learning as experienced by teachers of English as a foreign language and English as a second language and their Chinese EFL and ESL students in the
two contexts: China and New Zealand. Specifically, it explored classroom practice in terms of six key perspectives: instructional approaches, language pedagogy, use of textbooks, student modalities, error correction and classroom tasks by means of questionnaires, the Adapted Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching Observation Scheme, stimulated recall interviews and interviews.
Data for this study were collected from six regular scheduled lessons randomly selected and videotaped in the two tertiary contexts, as well as from the perspectives of 120 Chinese students and their 6 teachers 3 in each context who experienced and or viewed these videotaped lessons.
This thesis uses three theoretical strands: English language teaching contexts - definitions and distinguishing EFL and ELT approaches - the Grammar-Translation method , Communicative Language Teaching and the Task-Based Language Teaching and classroom practice - instructional approaches, language pedagogy, use of textbooks, student modality, error correction and classroom tasks. It revisits the background of Chinese traditional educational culture and its influences on Chinese English education, discusses the GTM and CLT in the Chinese EFL context, and covers the literature on ELT classroom practice in both contexts. These strands are used in theorizing the current research.
This research aims to enable the views of Chinese EFL and ESL tertiary students and their EFL and ESL teachers on ELT in these two contexts to be heard or studied[61,312]. It is an attempt to better comprehend the various factors which might aid or hinder the development of Chinese EFL and ESL students' English communicative competence in these English language classes. This includes addressing how EFL and ESL teachers might best help their Chinese students to achieve communicative competence in the classroom setting and which teaching approaches are the most effective in doing so.
The findings showed that a conventional teacher-centred instructional approach continues to have considerable purchase for Chinese EFL and ESL students in both contexts. The findings suggest that it is important and also necessary, to some extent, to have teacher-centred instruction and grammar teaching according to students' needs and students' language levels. Nonetheless, it also revealed that the Chinese ESL students who shared the same Chinese culture and English education background as the Chinese EFL students had different perspectives on classroom tasks conducted in the Chinese EFL context after they experienced the Western English education for a short time in New Zealand. Another finding of this study was that age-appropriateness should be taken into consideration by ESL teachers when they design their classroom tasks for Chinese ESL tertiary students.
The student’s role in a community or a classroom should not be that of a passive learner, as Dam characterized learner autonomy by “a readiness to take charge of one’s own learning in the service of one’s needs and purposes”. Autonomous learners are those who understand why they are learning specific topics, accept responsibility for their learning, take the initiative in planning and executing learning activities and are willing to assess their own learning . Learners’ active participation inand responsibility for their own learning process are essential in the Lumturie Bajrami Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences field of foreign language learning. The learner needs to be willing to “act independently and in cooperation with others, as a socially responsible person”. The learner’s role in an autonomous environment is not that of a passive receiver of information. Learners are the makers of their own fortune and valued members of a learning community that is theirclass. Autonomous learners have the ability and willingness to learn on their own. Learners become successful if they take responsibility for their own learning. It is up to learners if they want to learn. An important element to learner autonomy is self-assessment. Learners need to build up their own personal criteria for the quality of their work and develop independence from the teacher as the sole judge of their weaknesses and strengths. This helps the learners make informed decisions about their next steps in the learning process and removes the dependence on the teacher. They do not have to wait for him to tell them what to do next and how well they are doing. Even though the teacher remains the more knowledgeable and experienced person in the classroom, the goal is for learners to increase their knowledge and level of competence.
The teacher’s role in an autonomous learning classroom is to provide the learners with the skills and ability to practice what they have learned no matter if we talk about a language classroom or any other course. “Let me first of all mention the fact that learners do not necessarily learn what we believe ourselves to be teaching What we can do is give our learners an awareness of how they think and how they learn – an awareness which hopefully will help them come to an understanding of themselves and thus increase their self-esteem”.
A big part of implementing autonomy in the classroom is to teach diverse learning strategies, and assist the learners in finding the methods that best suit them. Many researchers and scholars who deal with learner autonomy have suggested a few ways or methods which teachers should use or implement during teaching. Some which are more common are logbooks, where teachers keep track of their student’s progress on the activities, a few minutes tack, use posters or other routines used in class, which have shown good results everywhere. All these tools should make learners become more self-sufficient and independent in the learning process. Every system of education should seek clearly and make sure to use learner autonomy, being that a part of language learning or other, the material which should be dealt during the time of study. In an autonomous classroom, teachers do not play the role of imparters of information or sources of facts[24,361]. Their
role is more that of a facilitator. The teacher’s position is to manage the activities in the classroom and help learners plan their learning both for long and short term.

Classroom interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or more people, resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other which takes place in the classroom. It is a complete action where teacher is one of the elements to assist this from happening. In the children classes, where a lot of students are having considerably minor exposure of language, need extra attention to help interaction to take place. This article aimed at contributing the teaching of English to young learners and promote the classroom interactions in children classes. The final section of this article proposes some techniques on how to initiate and promote interactions in children classes.

Interaction takes place where there are two or more people exchange thoughts, feelings, or ideas resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other. Classroom is the place where teachers and students communicate their thoughts, feelings, or ideas to each other in the form of ora lconversations to fulfill certain goals. Effective classroom interaction has two implications. The first one concerns a pleasant atmosphere in the classroom with friendly relationships among the participants of the learning process. The second one, encourages students to become effective
communicators in a foreign language. This can be achieved through various ways: by implementing different student and teacher roles, by exposing students to a varied classroom organisation, by employing a variety of activities, by helping students to express adjustments also necessary to be made when delivering the language the children; simplifying the language and clarifying its meaning with
gestures or movements, pictures, sound/voice, and illustrations will help children to have better comprehension when interacting with the teachers or other children. Interactions in children classes in not merely a matter of providing the learners with plenty of authentic language tasks in the classroom, but it requires specific skills and intuitions that differ from those of having it with the adults' learners. Teachers' Role is a crucial element in determining the success of interaction among students and between students and teacher. Teachers need to understand the characteristics of children learners in which they are different from adults in
terms of their attention span, learning attitudes, and language exposure. They think and act differently from adults and therefore they interact in different ways compare to adults. In addition, teachers need to posses special attitudes regarding to the characteristics of children learners; they, for some reasons need to be able to think like child, be animated, lively and enthusiastic for young learners are positive
about learning, teachers need to be humorous, patient and able to be special person for everyone, they also need to be aware of showing non-verbal language for children are positive about learning. Most teachers think conventionally, that they take the authority over the children; they rarely or even do not give chance for children to “experience” the learning for they are physically active learners. Also they learn best by doing; when they experience the learning, children will store this experience into their memory and when needed, they will easily be recalled. This is in line with Rivers that through interaction as a part of their experience in learning a foreign language, learners can increase their language store as they listen to read authentic linguistic material, and learners can use all they process of the language – all they have learned or absorbed in real life exchanges, where expressing their real meaning making is important to them.
Other attitudes and competences needed by teachers of children learners are having
excellent oral fluency, for they will be the role model for the learners, This competency, however, often neglected for teachers consider that children know only a little about the foreign language learned and that children will not notice when teachers are making mistakes when using English. Also, having knowledge of child psychology, which will help the teachers coping the problems with the children learners with full understanding, and mastering various teaching techniques to help them vary the teaching to meet the students profile and classroom situation . In regard to the characteristics of children, they are having short attention span and therefore need a lot of variation in learning, and indeed, teachers need to have enough mastery of teaching techniques. In fact, few teachers
are not aware of this, they tend to force the children to do what they say and act as what they told to for quite some times and only slight changes or variations are made in doing so. Teachers of children need to be animated and lively, for children are enthusiastic and positive about learning, and therefore teachers need to have extra creativity and competence in varying the activities during the teaching and learning process. As the effective classroom interaction has two implications, teachers need to be concerned with how to create friendly atmosphere and to give support to the learners to be effective communicators of the foreign language. The role of teachers is therefore very crucial to make the interaction to take place. This
article is aimed at proposing ideas to create the friendly atmosphere and encouragement to promote interaction in children classes. Interaction is the crucial part of the communicative competence through the use of language in various contexts to negotiate meaning. Through interaction also, learners are able to increase their language store as they listen to read or read authentic linguistic materials or even the output from the other learners during discussions, skits, joint problem-solving activities. Interactions can promote the language learning even at the elementary level through the activities of listening to or reading the authentic
linguistic materials, getting the output from the other students through discussion or problem solving tasks. They can also activate their background knowledge related to their life experience they get informally outside the school. It shows that interaction indeed, promote the language learning at any levels and any circumstances or settings, including classroom. In the classroom, teachers play important roles for maintain the interactions among the students. Teachers set or design, and also plan a lesson before having the lessons with the students. They need to make sure that there will be a conducive atmosphere in the classroom to conduct an interactive lesson in the teaching and learning process. In addition teachers need also to provide encouragement to learners to be effective

communicator of foreign language mentioned seven principles of effective interactions; first, automaticity, interactions focus more on meanings and messages rather than grammar or other linguistic forms for it will impede the learners to use the language more automatically; instead, they will think over the rules rather than

using the language to continue to automatic modes of processing. In children classes, automaticity needs time for their exposure is not enough; children must not be forced to have interaction; one of philosophy features mentioned that learners should not be forced to speak in the target language – that they would speak when they are ready and that the learners, rather that teachers should make decision. In this phase, teacher can provide children with help and/or assistance to make the feel secure, like providing them with a warm welcome such as initiating the introduction by greeting the children warmly by their name; - Hey, hello Erika, how are you today? and telling name; Hello, my name is Jane, what's your name? By doing so, children can feel welcomed and accepted, at least by the teacher.
It is related to the second principle of interaction proposed by Brown that is intrinsic motivation; it means that when everything comes from within the learners' needs, wants, and desire, they will behave accordingly. When learners intrinsically have their own willingness and motivation to learn to use the language, no reward is needed to make them proceed to have a better improvement for they are able to appreciate their own competence to use the language. Having intrinsic motivation for children, however, is not a simple thing to have, to promote this, teacher s, as what have been aforementioned, needs to constantly remind the children to speak in the target language they are learning to acquire. Creating a situation which allows children to feel free and enjoy the learning will help teachers to make the children motivated. We can start with the classroom setting and decoration, having an interesting and well-arranged classroom can help

children to feel comfortable in the classroom; having a warm-welcomed from the

teachers and the other children will also add children motivation, at least to love being in the classroom. These can be the initial ways of creating atmosphere to help them interacting with the classroom members: teachers and other children. Third, strategic investment, it refers to a series of adaptations or adjustments learners have to make during the interactions in order to maintain the interaction to keep running. It means that learners need to possess certain strategies to overcome the problems of comprehending and producing the language so that the interactions will proceed. Teachers can help by aiding children with more help and assistance when they are facing problems with the meaning making. Teachers can then have simpler language use modified with gestures, movements, pictures, and illustrations when conveying the language. Gradually, teachers can reduce their role in assisting the children whenever they are ready. By doing so, children will then discover their own strategies of learning to be more capable of solving their learning problems. Gradually, children will also be able to adjust and adapt with the interaction in learning. Learners may face numbers of failures and rejections when communicating with the other learners in terms of misinterpreting ideas, having incorrect understanding of others' intention, or being laughed at when saying things. These situations will lead learners to a more challenging circumstances in which the more they are able to cope with all those things, the more experience they get in dealing with meaning making in the interactions and therefore is able to make them better users of the language. To make this principle work with the children, teachers can give encouragement to the children whenever
they need helps, teachers can be there to support them by giving them assistance and motivation to try again and again.