Interactive Classroom Vs.

Traditional Classroom

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Language teaching in general, and applied language teaching in particular, has undergone a sea change
in the last two decades: long gone are the exclusively teacher-centered classrooms or traditional
classroom, applying the cramming method of teaching which is full of endless prose translations and
grammar or sentence structure explanations, and learners speaking only when spoken to by the teacher.
It has been replaced by the communicative approach to teach or we can call the interactive classroom,
with which most language teachers will be familiar.

Then, why we should change our traditional teaching methods? What deficiencies it has? What are the
advantages of an interactive classroom? How do the roles of teacher and learner changes? How actually
does an interactive classroom differ from a traditional classroom?

Generally speaking, interactive classroom provides students more opportunities for negotiation (of
form, content, and classroom rules of behavior), which creates an environment favorable to foreign
language learning and students learn in an active way. In contrast, teacher-centered classroom is shown
to provide rare opportunities for negotiation and students learn in a passive way.

In a teacher-learner interaction classroom, it is the students who play the major role of the class and the
teacher acts as a guide or an organizer. The atmosphere of the whole class has been changed from
completely teacher authority to learner autonomy with necessary teacher interference. In this kind of
class, the teacher often encourages learners to respond to questions not only from the teacher himself
or herself but also from other learners, effectively placing the responsibility of knowledge on the
learners. The teacher will involve the whole class in the resolution of the problem presented. He or she
by skillful use of language will transfer to learners not only the responsibility for their own learning but
also for each other’s learning. In this way, he or she has managed to turn the classroom into a
community with shared responsibility for learning. Through this kind of interaction, the teacher
managed to make learning a collaborative effort and to place responsibility for learning on the members
of the classroom community. Therefore, the students have been given more opportunities to
communicate with both the teacher and each other. And more important, the students and the teacher
appear to be in the equal position in class. With the relationship between teacher and student getting
more and more friendly, the result of teaching and learning will be more and more effective and
efficient.

However, traditional teacher-centered classroom put more emphasis on the teacher. It is the teacher
who dominates the whole class and act as an authority. Sometimes the teacher even presents himself as
the absolute possessor of knowledge that he delivers to the learners. Students do as the teacher says, so
that the teacher’s knowledge can be transmitted to them. The role of the learner is that of passive
receptacle of knowledge imparted by the teacher.

The traditional method usually emphasizes the teaching of the second language grammar, and its
principal practice technique is translation from and into the target language. More often the language is
presented in short grammatical chapters or lessons, each containing a few grammar points or rules,
which are set out and illustrated by examples. The grammatical features that are focused upon in the
course -book and by the teacher in his or her lesson are not disguised or hidden. A technical
grammatical terminology is not avoided. The learner is expected to study and memorize a particular rule
and examples, for instance, a verb paradigm or a list of prepositions. No systematic approach is usually
made to vocabulary or any other aspect of the second language. Exercises consist of words, phrases, and
sentences in the first language which the learner, with the help of a bilingual vocabulary list, translates
into the target language in order to practice the particular item or group of items. Other exercises are
designed to practice translation into the first language. As the learner progresses, he may advance from
translating isolated sentences to translating coherent second language texts into the first language or
first language texts into the second language.

This type of classroom, teacher –student interaction is minimal. And usually the students, the so-called
learners, only have to be obedient and accepted everything the teacher taught and have no chance
challenge the authority. They are put in the position of learning mechanically. Despite how clearly and
well constructed the teacher’s explanation may be, this type of discourse does not foster active mental
participation on the part of the learner because the learner, in his or her passive role, is not challenged
with any problem to solve. Therefore, the communication between teacher and students is so sharply
reduced that of course this kind of teaching method cannot reach the interactive level.

Then, let us look at the current foreign and second language teaching methodologies. They are based on
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which suggest that there is a benefit in switching from the
traditional teacher-centered class to a learner-centered classroom setting. One of the main differences
with traditional ways of teaching languages lies in the role of teacher and learner. The communicative
approach shifts the focus to the learner in several aspects of classroom instruction: The curriculum
reflects the needs of the learner, the activities engage learners in communication (involving information
sharing and negotiation of meaning), and the teacher’s role is that of facilitator in communication
process.

CLT advocates having students work in small groups in order to maximize their opportunities for
communicative practice. Acting as a guide of procedures and activities during communicative activities,
the teacher is responsible for establishing situations that are likely to promote communication. The role
of the learner is that of a communicator: Students interact with others, they are actively engaged in
negotiation of meaning, they have an opportunity to express themselves by sharing ideas and opinions,
and they are responsible for their own learning. As we mentioned before, CLT calls for a very active role
for learners in the classroom and increased responsibility for their own learning. So, the new role of the
student as “negotiator between the self, the learning process, and the object of learning” implies that
“he should contribute as much as he gains, and learn in an independent way” is applied. (Breen &
Candlin, 1980,p.110)

By contrasting teacher-learner interaction discourse from both teacher-centered and learner-centered

classrooms, we may easily find that the characteristic of the interaction classroom is that it wisely
combines the advantages of teacher-centered and learner-centered classrooms. Because extremely
learner-centered or teacher-centered classrooms both have their own fatal deficiencies, we have to find
a way to solve this problem. Then, the interactive classroom, which involves both teacher’s task and
learner’s task, came into existence.

In addition, it is considered the teaching is essentially an interactive process among a group of people
learning in a social setting usually described as “the classroom”. Also, interaction has been defined by
Simpson and Galbo as “all manner of behavior in which individuals and groups act upon each other. The
essential characteristic is reciprocity in actions and responses in an infinite variety of relationships:
verbal and non-verbal, conscious and unconscious, enduring and casual. Interaction is seen as a
continually emerging process, as communication in its inclusive sense.” Implicit in this description of
teaching as an interactive process is the need to develop shared understanding in a community of
knowledge users and developers. It is believed that the sharing of experience potentially has two
outcomes. First, students may come to value their practical knowledge instead of viewing it as inferior
to the scientific knowledge produced by researchers of teaching. Second, the shared experience is
strong collegiality.

We can also find that teachers can engage learners in the negotiation of meanings, language forms, and
classroom rules by using various discursive moves, and in so doing can also promote learner’s active
mental participation, which may have a role in foreign language learning.

As the interactive learning is the heart of CLT, it requires a lot of pair / group work both in class and out
of class, which can provide students more opportunities for communicating and exchanging their own
ideas as well as encourage students to learn more independently and flexibly. In addition to that,
interactive learning also requires the teacher trying his or her best to let the students receive authentic
language input in real-word context, by which the students can produce genuine and meaningful
language during communication. So, it is obviously related to the teacher talk. In the era of
communicative language teaching, analyses of teacher talk typically focus on the characteristics that
make or fail to make such talk “communicative”. In most cases, the criteria for communicativeness are
taken from what is felt to constitute communicative behavior in the world outside the classroom. Thus,
communicative classrooms are held to be those in which features of genuine communication are
evident, and, by exclusion, classes where they are not present are considered to be uncommunicative.

Teacher talk in the EFL classroom sometimes is considered to be something of a danger area for
language teachers, and trainee teachers are warned to use it sparingly. “Good” teacher talk may means
“little” teacher talk, since it is thought that too much teacher talking time deprived students of
opportunities to speak. Interest in teacher talk with the profession has since shifted away from a
concern with quantity towards a concern with quality: while the question of how much teachers talk is
still important, more emphasis is give to how effectively they are able to facilitate learning and promote
communicative interaction in their classroom through, for example, the kind of questions they ask, the
speech modifications they make when talking to learners, or the way they react to student errors.

What’s more, both the students and teacher should pay attention to the opportunities of using words,
especially in the practice of oral communication because this kind of spontaneous and actual
conversation will prepare them for actual language use in future. Therefore, we can say good teacher
talk supports a communicative environment in the classroom, and specifically on how authentic it is,
judged by how far it shares features of so-called authentic communication outside the classroom. In
those conversations, the students will feel free to express their ideas, which are shared by the teacher
or group members. In fact, sometimes students will continue performing role-plays or holding
discussions after class. The negotiation of classroom norms contributed to create a learning atmosphere
of agreed norms in which learners feel comfortable to express their feelings about the learning setting.
The success of the interaction is dependent on positive interpersonal relationships among the
participants. In this case, mutual respect leads to the teacher yielding authority and negotiating rules for
classroom behavior.

So, we can say that interaction, participation and negotiation create learning opportunities in the
foreign language classroom. The microanalysis of classroom discourse allows us to witness how
language is used as a mediation tool in the learning process. Socio-cultural theory provides an ideal
framework to analyze classroom interaction because one of its main principles is that cognitive
development, and thus, learning originates in a social context (such as the language classroom).
Effective interaction uses language as a psychological tool to serve assisting functions in problem-solving
situations. Thus, through dialogue, teachers can provide learners with effective assistance that will
enable them to perform at higher levels than they would otherwise. It is believed that communicative
activities foster a great amount of linguistic production, thus providing language practice and
opportunities for the learners to become highly involved in the negotiation of meaning and form during
communicative exchanges, which has been claimed to be beneficial for language learning.

Now, we can conclude that the interactive classroom is far better and more effective than traditional
classroom in the foreign-language teaching classroom. Learners in a communicative classroom can learn
faster and more actively than in a teacher-centered classroom. They will be encouraged to ask for
information, seek clarification, express an opinion, agree or disagree with peers and teacher. And for
the teachers, on the one hand, an interactive classroom has shortened the distance between he or she
and the learners, creating a harmonious atmosphere, on the other hand, it also provide an opportunity
to further learn and practice the language in the course of looking for various communicative activities.