How Do EFL/ESL Teachers Provide Opportunities for
Students to Interact In English?
Some EFL/ESL classes are taught in a fairly
teacher centered fashion. Interaction is dominated by the teacher who, for
example, gives lengthy explanations and lecturers, drills repetitvely, asks the
majority of the questions, and makes judgments about the students answers.
Some teachers who aim at having an interactive
classroom begin lessons with Littlewood calls “precommunicative activities.”
The porpose of precommunicative activities is for the teacher to isolate
specific elements of knowledge or skill
that comprise communicative ability, giving students opportunities to practice
them without having to fully engage in
communicating meaning. Two types of precommunicative activities: structural and
quasi-communicative. Structural activities focus on the grammar and lexicon
(vocabulary)of English, while quasi-communicative activities focus on how the
language is used to communicate meaning.
The teacher’s goal was to teach students how to
ask about food likes and dislike. The teacher first taught a grammatical item,
the use of the auxilary verb do when used in a yes-no question.
She then did a vocabulary-building activity
(another structural activity) in which she put large pictures of food items on
the wall.
Then the teacher help up a picture of each item
(e.g, of a piece of cake), and as she did this, she did this, she asked the
whole class, “Do you like to eat cake?”
The teacher then handed out a dialogue that
combined grammatical and vocabulary items