[livinginkorea]

What do you think are the different types of interaction that take place in your classroom? How can we make our students to engage in more postive interaction with ourselves and their classmates?

[simplyesl]

Teacher - Student
Student - Student
Student - Teacher

I think that student to student interaction is what we should aim for - if they can interact with each other without us helping them out then we've done our job as a teacher.

[livinginkorea]

Quote simplyesl

Teacher - Student
Student - Student
Student - Teacher

I think that student to student interaction is what we should aim for - if they can interact with each other without us helping them out then we've done our job as a teacher.

Agree with you on the types of interaction but would like to know what are the effective methods on how to achieve good interaction between each? Stuff like pair work / role plays / drills?

Actually it's part of my assignment papers. I am thinking of incorporating an observation method like SCORE, which is a simple seating observation method and I have to modify it a little and explain why I modified and if it helped. The one that I saw didn't take into account student to student interaction so that is something that I am considering now.

Any more advice is greatly appreciated!

[simplyesl]

I always aim to get myself out of the picture as soon as I can to get the sts interacting comfortably with each and the language. There are definitely plenty of st-st drills you can do. I use drills as the bread and butter st-st interaction.... then I add some meat. I use all sorts of activities, depending on what kind a mood I'm in, the language and the ability of the students. Like you said, team work and role plays. Games, task based activities. Anything that you can think of that they sts enjoy and gets the teacher out of the picture as much as possible.
I do like playing games with my sts though and I think that the sts respond well when the teacher is 'being one of the sts' (I often take a sts seat and tell them to set-up a game or activity/explain the language. Oh, I also deliberately get answers wrong).

[livinginkorea]

This is the question that I will do...

"Devise a project investigating an aspect of interaction in your classroom, using one of the observation systems you have read about (or a modified version). Explain and justify your choice of
observation instrument, as well as any modifications you feel it necessary to make to the orginal instrument. Write a report on your findings."

I plan to start writing my project paper on Monday or Tuesday and will show the difference in the amount of interaction between students in pair work and students in group work activities. I hope that it's an interesting topic to do and that it will get decent marks. I will take some stats from one of my classes and hopefully show that either pair work or group work provides more interaction than the other.

Any comments or ideas?

[ahmedxzxz]

i agree with you