The reflective summary of the discussion on “Interactive Language Teaching”

In chapter 11-“Interactive language teaching-initiating interaction”, it main describes the interactive principles, the roles of interactive teacher and the function of questioning strategies. After reading the whole chapter, I produce two questions for classmates to discuss, and in the following I summarize their opinions for discussion.

1. In five roles of the teacher mentioned above, which one do you think is most appropriate? Please state your reason.
Because I think a teacher must play a lot of roles in the course of teaching, there are many metaphors used for describing a teacher. In the textbook, the author lists five roles to describe an interactive teacher. Maybe for a teacher who handles with good interaction, the roles are not same to the generally traditional teacher. So I hope classmates can discuss which role do they think is most appropriate for an interactive teacher. And basically in their opinion, they think the manager of a company is the best metaphor. A successful manager can govern the whole company and keep all employees to have the same goal, but does not absolutely control their all behaviors. The manager still gives all employees freedom to develop their personal unique ability. So a good teacher should build up a complete lesson structure, and students can still have room to show their creativity. That is, the teacher can design an interesting lesson and clearly tell students the main objective the teacher hopes they can achieve. But students can add some their own opinions to make the whole process more lividly. The teacher gives students a larger direction, and must believe students so that students can get free to develop their own creativity, just like the manger of company must believe all employees so that they have a happy cooperation and interaction.

2. Do you think how does a teacher handle the proportion of display and referential questions according to students’ level? Why?
Display question means the questioner has already known the answer and just seeks to elicit responses from other people, and referential question means the questioner really request the information. Generally speaking, the higher level students are, the more referential questions the teacher can use. If you use too many referential questions when you teach the students of the lower level, they usually can not give you deeper feedback and there is no room for discussion between you and your students because they only have learned easier knowledge. So, it is more meaningless to discuss with or request information from the students of the lower level. On the contrary, the higher level students perhaps can provide some more interesting opinions to surprise the teacher because the teacher does not think of that. So there is a larger space to think and discuss between teacher and student.