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According to Mora (1995), students who were not familiar with the themes of the discussion could not initiate interaction even if they had opportunities.
When students had background information about issues discussed in class, they had more opportunities to find something to say, and they were likely to initiate interaction. By contrast, students who did not understand the topic might not speak at all or limit themselves to one or two short statements. Therefore, ability of students to participate in class discussion was determined in part by their familiarity with the topic.
The second issue is related to language use. Helen mentioned that students
needed as much exposure as possible to L2 input in that class time may be the only time in their daily lives when they encountered the language. However, within limited time in class, all English instruction could be rather complicated to set up for students with lower English proficiency. Sometimes, a quick switch to L1 could efficiently ensure that students understand a difficult concept or an unknown word. Her comments were consistent with the previous research(Atkinson, 1987). The research reviewed has shown that students’ L1 does play a facilitating role in foreign language classroom. Limited and judicious use of the mother tongue in the English classroom does not reduce students’ exposure to English, but rather can assist in the teaching and learning processes.
The next issue concerns activity types. To solve the problem that classes were too large to offer many opportunities to practice the language, group work was one of Helen’s strategies to give the students more opportunities to speak so as to promote classroom interaction. According to Brown (2001), “group work provides opportunities for student initiation, for face-to-face give and take, for practice in negotiation of meaning, for extended conversational exchanges, and for students’
adoption of roles that would otherwise be impossible” (p. 178). Apart from that,
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group work also offers an embracing affective climate, and promote learner responsibility and autonomy. Given the importance of group work in language classroom, it is not surprising that Helen spent some of her class time on group work activities. One interesting finding was that Helen allowed her students to check their answers with their peers before offering them to the whole class, which encouraged students to speak up. When students came to join the class discussion after their own group discussion, some of them were willing to speak up. It was found that the students cooperated with each other in pursuit of common goals and had more confidence in their answer because they had peer support. However, it was observed that the students were not given enough opportunities for negotiation of meaning and for conversational exchanges. The function of group work seemed limited. It is important to note that “group work does not mean simply putting students into groups and having them do what you would otherwise do as a whole class” (Brown, 2001, p.179).
A fourth issue, communicative language use, is thought to have a
considerable influence on classroom interaction. Helen’s training as an English teacher led her to emphasize communicative interaction in her language teaching.
She believed in the effectiveness of communicative language teaching and consistently tried to implement it in the classroom. For example, she commented in the interview, “I learn English through communication, so I fully believe in CLT, communicative approach.” According to Helen, communicative interaction had a powerful influence on the quality of the learners’ learning experience. She believed that language is a useful tool, and students should be given the chance to use the language as she reported in the interview.
“我自己最喜歡的類型是學生跟學生之間的互動，時間多的話，我喜歡讓他們
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做 information gap，假如說他們今天可能要做個 interview，問其他學生喜歡什麼活 動，他們問完時候接下來我就會抽籤，請問一下同學 What’s Helen’s favorite activity 是什麼?我喜歡的是讓學生去使用那個語言。”
[= I like the interaction between students. If I have more time, I would like the students to engage in the activity of information gap. For instance, they may be asked to conduct an interview to ask the other students’ favorite activities. When they finish the activity, I would ask some students what Helen’s favorite activity is. I like my students to use the language to do something. ] Extract from the interview with Helen.
Consistent with the previous studies (Borg, 2003; Clark & Peterson, 1986;
Rust, 1994), it seemed that Helen’s instruction style had a lot to do with her previous learning experiences and education background. Her use of various activities and incorporation of the students’ opinions in class may be related to the variety of instruction activities in her previous English learning experience, as Borg (2003) pointed out teacher’s beliefs or conceptions of teaching could originate from their academic background, teacher education training, previous learning and teaching experiences.
However, it was found that Helen’s endorsement of communicative approach was not authenticated in her teaching practice due to the contextual constraints.
Most of the interaction in her teaching was drilling. The students were trained to give rapid, automatic responses. One cannot deny that mechanical drills do have some value in language classrooms because they allow learners to interact with each other before they are able to create many utterance of their own. However, we should be aware of the limitations of mechanical drills. Drills could not
directly become part of the creative language system (White & Lightbown, 1984).
It is suggested that more genuine communication and communicative interaction should take place in the second language classroom.
The final issues have something to do with teacher questioning behavior-
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what kind of questions teachers ask, for what purposes, what kind of questioning strategies teachers use to elicit learners’ responses, and so on. Helen held true that questioning was a good way to provide learners with more opportunities for interaction in that students who were less likely to participate were usually encouraged, or forced to speak when they were asked to speak. Consistent with her beliefs, through observation, it was found that she often made use of
questioning to promote classroom interaction. According to Swain (1993), output may be an important factor in successful second language acquisition. If output leads to better learning, then questions can be an important tool in the language classroom, especially in those EFL contexts where the classroom provides the only opportunity to produce the target language.
Through observation, it was also found that display questions outnumbered referential ones. That is, when Helen asked a question in class, she almost knew the answer to it before she asked. In other words, she was not really seeking information from the students, but rather checking up on the students in some way- whether or not they had understood. However, studies reviewed showed that referential questions could better generate students’ output production. Teachers who incorporated more referential questions into their classes stimulated student responses that were longer and more grammatically complex (Brock, 1986).
Nevertheless, it would be dangerous to generalize that referential questions are more useful for language learning or display ones are useless. Each context requires an appropriate strategy for itself. Display questions, for example, can serve as “the necessary prerequisite skills for more communicative work” (Nunan, 1987, p. 137). Such questions serve certain instructional purposes such as drawing learners’ attention or triggering learners to do practice in the target language.
Therefore, both of these questions have their place in the classroom.
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In addition to questioning types, questioning strategies were found effective strategies in encouraging students’ oral participation and in promoting classroom interaction in Helen’s actual teaching. Although questioning was a good way to increase the amount of speaking learners do in the classroom, it was found that the reply called for did not always appear immediately after Helen’s question. In that case, Helen often deployed a variety of questioning strategies to elicit the students’
responses. Scrutiny of classroom data revealed that the participating teacher frequently employed the strategy of providing examples, giving key words, offering translation, providing sentence patterns, and waiting more time.
Obviously, if teachers are concerned with the quantity of student output, it is not enough to focus on the types of teacher questions. Questioning strategies must be considered as well. According to Mehan (1979), students do not always respond immediately after teacher’s questions. If the reply called for by the teacher does not appear, the teacher may employ questioning strategies until the expected reply is obtained. The questioning strategies include prompting replies, repeating elicitations, and simplifying elicitations.