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Interaction and negotiation
Certain types of learning activities, especially group activities where students need to exchange information with each other, help students engage in interaction and negotiation (back-and-forth conversation to agree on something).
Effective interactive discussion and negotiation leads to noticing, hypothesis testing, and metatalk.
When students are becoming aware of language, testing their hypotheses (educated guesses) about language forms, and engaging in metatalk, their language learning improves.
Most teachers understand the value of group work in classrooms. Often, they plan for their students to work in pairs and groups.
Group interaction allows students to understand concepts they need for their curriculum learning. Working together, they negotiate new learning.
Different learning activities have different purposes. For example, activities where students either share different points of view or reach an agreement help them think about a range of opinions on a particular topic or idea. Such activities can also support students' language learning.
If you want your students to engage in negotiation and interaction that promotes language learning, there are ways you can structure their learning tasks. In the context of language learning and teaching, the word "task" describes a learning activity in which learners use the language they are learning for real communication.
In a learning languages context, a task is an activity that:
Learners acquire language and develop fluency when they are engaged in tasks that allow them to create meaning for a purpose that is authentic (applies to a real-life setting). Often, these types of task are driven by internal rewards. In other words, the motivation to engage comes from within because it is naturally satisfying.
The types of language-learning tasks that result in the most negotiation and interaction among students include tasks that:
Jigsaw activities create the conditions that lead to interactions helpful for language learning.
Jigsaw activities can be short, discrete activities (a planned one that yields a specific outcome). Or they can provide a way of structuring all the learning that is taking place around a particular topic or unit of work.
Jigsaw Classroom describes ways jigsaw learning can be organised and some learning outcomes that can result from it.
Input alone can teach a certain amount about a language, but interaction is also necessary for full learning.
This is because during the process of interaction, learners receive feedback on their own errors. This feedback is focused. It is at a level appropriate for the speaker. It is timely: someone give the feedback just after the speaker’s error.
As participants in interactions negotiate meaning (that is, talk with others to reach understanding or agreement), they seek clarification from others and check their understanding.
Reconstructing a strip story is a language-learning task.
This is a split-information activity. Each student is given part of a story or other text. They read the text several times, so they can become familiar with it. They could also memorise the text.
Then, they talk with others in the group. Each person shares what they remember about the part of the story or text they read.
After that, they work together and reconstruct the complete text, in the correct order, from recall or memory. To do this, they might have to repeat their bit – or each sentence from their bit – many times.
To set up a strip story, choose a short but complete text – for example, a short narrative or a description.
Even a text as short as the following could be used with five group members.
Example of a strip story text
"A compound of sulphur that is easily recognised by its unpleasant smell is hydrogen sulphide (H2S).It is a gas that is found in thermal places such as Rotorua, in New Zealand.
This gas is poisonous.
Small quantities are enough to cause dizziness, headaches, and nausea."
You could follow up a story strip activity in one of more of these ways.
Use a different text
Prepare a different type of text for a subsequent strip-story activity. Note, however, that the task will no longer be entirely unfamiliar to students, and they will have worked out some processes to get it done more efficiently, although probably with less language-based interaction.
Change the conditions
Vary the conditions of the task so it is less familiar to students than the first time they did the task. For example, you could change the group size or the length of text to be learned or memorised. Or you could give them parts of sentences rather than whole sentences.
Use students' first language
Bilingual Pasifika students who share a language can easily reconstruct a strip story in their language. If they are in two groups, each group could make the activity strips for the other group.