Paige Shaw Focused Observation 1 6.

1 Managing classroom communication: patterns of interaction Background I was specifically concerned with how communication takes place in the classroom, and with the patterns of interaction during this observation. I observed an Italian 102 class with approximately 13 students in attendance. They have been in class for approximately one month, meeting three times a week for 50 minutes per class. They are various ages but the majority are in their late teens and early twenties. There are more females than males in the class. I chose this class because I thought the size of the class was more conducive to classroom interaction and it also mirrors a level which I will be most likely to teach when I graduate. I have also attended the class for my own benefit at other times and I noticed and liked the way that the teacher gets her students to interact with her and each other. I have drawn a seating arrangement including students names as well as their movements during the lesson. I have also drawn symbols to represent different kinds of interactions with different colors or patterns symbolizing different activities. Task Objective In this task, I collected data about how communication is realized in the classroom, for example, who talks and to whom, who questions, who responds. During the Lesson This lesson was based on the simple past tense. The beginning started out with a small review and a list that was displayed on the projector of different activities that we may have done over the weekend. As a warm up, the class had to work in groups using some of these words to discuss what they did over the weekend. Afterwards, the teacher asked for voluntary student responses to give examples of what they discussed in their small groups. Then the teacher moved on to an activity where the class had to create a story using the past tense. The teacher started at one side of the room, and each student had to create a sentence instantly and orally and she called on each student until the story was concluded. Next the teacher moved along with the lesson/ review by introducing new vocabulary with the same form that the students had been using. The teacher showed this new vocabulary with an accompanying picture and asked the whole class if anyone had done this activity. The students gave spontaneous oral responses. When this concluded, the teacher had the whole class stand in a circle in the front of the class with one person in the middle (which I did not draw each movement to the circle because I thought it would be too crowded). The students in the middle took turns calling out actions using

the form that they had learned in class and the student in the middle had to act it out. There were three people that took turns in the middle and this activity concluded the class. After the Lesson 1. There seems to be a definite pattern of interaction and tendency in this language classroom. As I conferred with the teacher, I realized that she tended to try to use conversational activities that required everyone in the room to speak at least once, and then after she would allow the students to guide the interaction a bit more. Because she has such a reasonably sized class, it is easier for her to force output and communication between all of her students in one way or another, but there are still a few students that tend to stand out and volunteer their interactions more frequently than the others. 2. I think that all of the interaction patterns are conducive to learning in this classroom because, like I said earlier, I have attended this class many other times and so I know that the teacher uses these same few patterns of interaction in almost every class period. I think that the overall combination and pattern of interaction helps the students greatly because they have to discuss things in small groups first, when there is less pressure, and then they have to also say different things but using the same form out loud. They then have other conversational activities that simultaneously lower their affective filters by adding humor and movement into the classroom. This makes them have to use the language as spontaneously as a 102 level student can and still have the most participation possible. 3. I think that it is possible to correlate interaction patterns to be more suitable for different interaction types. For example after the information gap activity where students had to ask each other what they did during the weekend and respond, the logical following interaction was a teacher-student interaction where the student told the teacher what had been discussed. I do, however, think that there can be a variety of interaction types that will all be beneficial and should be based on other factors such as classroom size and variation from what had been done prior to that activity. 4. In addition to the given points on the advantages of learner-based groupwork, an advantage I noticed when observing this classroom is that it allows for an easier transition into speaking in front of the whole class. The students can look up unknown words and collaborate on structure before having to test it in front of everyone. There can also be the added benefit of having additional assistance for the weaker students, which simultaneously helps the stronger students because they are having to explain the information that they have learned to the weaker ones. A disadvantage to groupwork is that some students usually do more of the work than others and keep the conversation going, and so the others are not being forced to do as much as if they were all to be called on one-by-one. This is why a variety of interaction types is best like I have observed with this class. There were both learner-based groupwork activities and teacher-directed communication.

Reflection This observation has both comforted me and taught me a lot about patterns of interaction and ways to create more interaction between all of my students. I found comfort in the fact that I noticed that even in this class, which I consider to be a very communicatively based and interactionally based class, there are students who naturally speak more or less. This is something I had worried about when observing my class and I think I learned that it is not solely my fault. I also learned that there are techniques that I can apply to keep everyones interaction to a maximum such as the story continuation, the information gap paired activity and the group role play with different participants as the actor. I think I have learned from this that I need to vary the types of interaction in my classroom more and make the students rely on each other more as well. After observing this class I want to try to incorporate some type of interaction into every activity that I do. I will strive for the greatest amount of interaction possible in my class so that students can have the maximum amount of air-time possible.