Get it together: exploring the dynamics of teacher-student interaction in English as a foreign language lessons

The English language plays a major role in Dutch society. It is therefore of crucial importance that students in secondary education develop their communicative competence in this language. Interaction fosters language development, which stresses the need for language learners to practice the skill of shared meaning-making through social interaction. Nienke Smit analyzed teacher-student interaction in English as a foreign language lessons. She developed two new instruments, one for observing teaching strategies for scaffolding reading comprehension and one for question and answer patterns. Results revealed that teachers are most active during the lesson. On average, they ask one question every minute. Students usually respond with very short answers. Long student responses were scarce. Teachers asked very few open questions and these questions often did not lead to longer student answers. This observational study provides insight in the way these classroom interaction patterns emerge.
In order to find out whether teachers recognized the results from their own teaching practice, teachers who had not participated in the observational study participated in a validation study. A large majority of the respondents recognized the dominant pattern of closed questions and short answers. They attributed the limited student responses to emotional factors, such as boredom, embarrassment and anxiety.
This research showcases how classroom observation might be used to identify the room for growth. In order to facilitate meaningful interaction it is recommended to focus on the learning process in which both the teacher and the students may share the responsibility to get it together.