Ways of interacting

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Andrew Patterson
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Ways of interacting

Post by Andrew Patterson » Fri Apr 13, 2012 9:36 pm

I haven't been in this forum for a very long while. If you'll forgive me.

I have been wondering recently about the different ways in which a teacher might interact with a student and vice versa and how students may interact with each other. A teacher may do any of the following to one or more student:
instruct,
present,
elicit
monitor,
question,
correct,
motivate, etc, etc

A student may do any of the following to a teacher:
answer,
ask for clarrification,
ask for elaboration, etc, etc

A student may do any of the following things with one or more students:
ask,
answer,
discuss, etc, etc.

I was wondering if together we could come up with a more comprehensive list of the most useful interactions. Thanks.




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fluffyhamster
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Post by fluffyhamster » Tue Apr 17, 2012 1:04 am

Good to hear from you again, Andy (I for one had feared you were dead!). I'm afraid that me and Sally seem to be the only two of the old AL regulars you knew who are at all active on here nowadays (I guess the bottom has well and truly fallen out of TEFLing).

I used to bounce around such labels (instruct[or] etc) myself, when prompted to by methodology books. Looking at them now though they strike me as being a bit cold and clinical, and if replaced by 'converse, conversationalist' (in the actual trying-to-teach~impart its skills sense, I mean), a lot of interesting types of talk seem to open up to me (joking, telling anecdotes and stories, gossiping, etc). Anyway, just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
Last edited by fluffyhamster on Wed Sep 02, 2015 5:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Andrew Patterson
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Post by Andrew Patterson » Tue Apr 17, 2012 6:55 pm

Thank you Fluffy. What this is about is that I have a lesson plan form in my current job that has a heading "interaction". It seems to me that this is something that needs analysis. I'm in the process of writing little arrows with interaction that I can paste into a lesson plan but I have to get a new website to do it now geocities has closed.

fluffyhamster
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Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again

Post by fluffyhamster » Wed Apr 18, 2012 1:54 am

Have you looked at observation schemes such as those mentioned in the following paper (that I dredged up by Googling Nunan and COLT):
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/c ... vette1.pdf

Andrew Patterson
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Post by Andrew Patterson » Wed Apr 18, 2012 9:34 pm

I'd never heard the terms referential and display question. They are horrible terms. The British council website defines them as follows:

"Display questions are questions you ask to see if the person you are speaking to knows the answer. In an ELT classroom, this normally means questions teachers ask learners to see if they understand or remember something. Display questions can be compared to referential questions, which are questions you ask because you don't know the answer."

"Referential questions are questions you ask someone because you don't know the answer. In an ELT classroom, this can mean questions teachers ask learners and learners ask each other. Referential questions can be compared to display questions, for which the answer is already clear and teachers ask just to see if the learners know the answer, or for language manipulation."

I noticed:
"“With the growth in concern for communication in language classrooms… the supposition
is that open/general questions, or referential questions, would promote greater learner
productivity, and the latter would likely promote more meaningful communication between
teacher and learner.” (Chaudron, 1988: 127)"

These aren't just other terms for open and closed questions I presume.

Appendix A looks interesting. I am going to take a bit from that. My interest was planning so I'll only take the positive stuff for that purpose (one would never plan to "treat error immediately in threatening manner") but it is as well to dwell on what one shouldn't as well as should do or indeed have done. If I can criticise the appendix, it seems a bit generalising of behavour, for instance, there are degrees of threatening from scarcasm to violence.

Andrew Patterson
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Post by Andrew Patterson » Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:29 pm

Well, here's the sort of thing I had in mind:
http://andrewpatterson.weebly.com/

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