Interaction in Class

Thinking about teaching English in any level of Primary Education I consider the most appropriate approach is the Communicative. Why? Communicative approach emphasizes communication through interaction, involves meaningful and real communication and in my feeling, taking into account the personal experiences of students is the best way for them to learn a language.

  Interacting with children is more easily than we think being that they are always ready to talk and to have fun so in order to that we must create the correct classroom environment for supporting natural acquisition. How create it? By storytelling, learning by teaching, songs, interviews, debates, role playing, working in pairs, games…

Some learning and teaching strategies to promote interaction in class can be:

- Use different mediums to present information: visual, written

- Meaningful vocabulary

- Taking into account background knowledge

- Physical involvement

- Emotional connection

To my mind, there are a lot of advantages like students are responsible of their activities, they learn significant and useful contents of their everyday life, they learn in different ways developing different competences in each activity… But as everything, it has some disadvantages as can be that children don’t know what the aim of the activity is and they just have fun or play. Also, they can get lost easily if they don’t have the correct instruction of the teacher and for the teacher as well it can be difficult to identify and correct mistakes.