Wallpaper to wallpaper, talk, talk.

A short summary of articles by Xie, and Walsh

Xie’s article details a study of the state of Classroom interactions in China. While, Walsh deals more with teacher to student interactions and the negative and positive effects of teacher talk time or, TTT. The metering of teacher input, called by Walsh as being constructive and obstructive teaching. Whereas constructive was beneficial to student talk, productive in producing better sentences from students and in the long run, becoming more contemplative through the use of waiting time. Obstructive teaching was directed at the imbalance of TTT. Too much leads to students essentially switching off. Interrupt too many times or finish a students utterances and students will switch off. Why think and try hard when the teacher is going to do that for you?

Xie throughout her article refers back to the state of classrooms in ESL classrooms in China. She stated that the classrooms that were taught by native Chinese used dated methods, more akin to their subject teaching. The methodology of ESL teaching is greatly different to that of subject teaching. Better classroom interactions and the quality of classroom life are ways to better teacher to student and student to student dialogues.

I’m going to apply the interaction patterns to my classes. In thinking of the patterns, I do ask a lot of questions, both display and referential type questions. But what I would like to implement is student to student interactions. I have my own ruminations on this, but a general question to the readership out there, is, can you share any methods, tips or tricks with the rest of us?