In order to analyze the proposed interaction types I have developed the following graph:

STUDENT-CENTERED
This is the epitome of a student-centered type of activity as the teacher is mainly a guide:
the student not only chooses the topic by him/herself, but he/she also works with no
intervention of the teacher (Ur, 1996:228). This is part of the new trends in learner’s
autonomy within the CLT approach, which aims “to produce a learner who is increasingly
Self-access aware, self-reliant, better able to learn directly from experience, gradually outgrowing the
need for a teacher” (Trim, 1981).

When students are working completely on their own, the teacher talk virtually disappears
after providing the directions. The teacher monitors and supports the students during the
development of the activity if necessary, but the work is developed rather independently
(Ur, 1996:228). Scrivener (1994:212) supports this idea by stating that, for speaking
Individual activities for instance, such as walking around asking and answering questions as a
guessing game, working individually “is likely to provide opportunity for the most speaking
by the largest number of people” in comparison to other types of interaction.

The collaboration is mainly the same as the individual work, but usually in pairs, where the
students work together and help each other (Ur, 1996:228), therefore the same logics
would apply. The reason why I have put it in third place is because, in case it were a
speaking activity for instance, it is possible that one of the student talks more than the
other because of their personality type, or in any kind of skill, one of them might be
stronger than the other, and therefore the introverted one or the weaker one, would
Collaboration
participate less. However, this does not mean this would be something detrimental for the
weaker student, as according to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, which is the
“the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can
achieve with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner” (McLeod, 2019), a
weaker learner can actually benefit from working with a stronger partner.

Once again, this is a very student-centered type of interaction, as the teacher hardly ever
intervenes (Ur, 1996:228) and the talking and cooperation happens between students
only, letting them express themselves in a free way and putting the focus of the learning
process on learners. In small group work speaking tasks, it can sometimes even be tricky
to know when to end the activity as students might keep talking (Scrivener: 1994, 53),
Group work which is a decision we should make according to the aim of the lesson, but usually, if
fluency is to be promoted, we should let them go on as long as they keep talking. In this
scenario, the zone of proximal development concept applies as well, in a lower degree
though, because as the number of members grows it is more likely one or some of them
might not work as much as the others.

In a full or whole-class activity, the center keeps being the student, as the teacher would
act as monitor only (Ur, 1996:228). However, the activity needs to be well-organized and
planned in order to promote the participation of the biggest possible number of students,
Full-class
as “it is mathematically true that the whole-class activity will allow a smaller number of
interaction
people to be speaking at the same time” (Scrivener: 1994:212), and this might help some
shier students to “hide” in the others’ participation and not participate at all.

In this kind of activity, the student keeps being important, as he initiates the interaction,
but as far as I can see, he or she is not the center anymore. Here the teacher decides both
Student the topic and who will be asking the questions (Ur, 1996:228). This activity will probably
initiates, lead to a big amount of teacher talk, as students just ask, but not answer the questions. It
teacher might be a good way to somewhat shift the attention to the students from more teacher-
answers centered activities, as the teacher might give only short answers and let students be the
“stars” of the activity.
 In contrast to the last type of interaction, in open-ended teacher questioning the teacher
asks and the student answers. There are several possible answers for each question, which
Open-ended
gives the opportunity of more students to participate (Ibid). However, the teacher keeps
teacher
being the center as he/she initiates the interaction, plans the questions and has full control
questioning
of the outcomes.

Close-ended Similar to the last type of interaction, the only difference here is that the questions are
teacher more restricted, and thus students’ participation is even lower as there is just one possible
questioning right answer to the question (Ibid). In my opinion, this makes students feel less confident
and willing to participate, as they know there is a big chance they might be wrong
according to the teacher’s terms. From what I have seen, in this kind of activity the teacher
even tends to choose the strongest students to answer, which reduces even more the
chance of student’s participation.

In choral responses, contrary to what it may seem by listening to a lively group of students
chanting words and phrases loudly, I believe the teacher is the center, as he/she decides
which items will be part of the drilling activity, as well as the type of drilling to be
Choral
developed. Drilling is still being used in contemporary ELT approaches, but it has mainly
responses
been linked to traditional ones, where the teacher was the center, such as the audiolingual
method (Funiber: 2016, 34-35).

Quite clearly, the interaction type that maximizes the attention towards the teacher is the
teacher talk, which can be developed though “lecturing”, but in many other ways in the
classroom. Some types of teacher talk are necessary, such as giving directions, but in
Teacher talk general terms TTT (teacher-talking-time) should be kept to a minimum, so that we avoid
excluding the participation of learners (Scrivener: 1994, 58), as we have moved away from
supporting Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, which considered teacher talk to
be the main source of input of the L2 for learners (Krashen, Terrel, 1995:59)
TEACHER-
CENTERED
Vivanco, P. 2019