Student interaction

As part of the CMC strand, I’ve been attending a couple of presentations on student interaction. The first of these highlighted one of the things which we as teachers need to think about in order to foster interaction among students: the design of the tasks. How does one create tasks that support interaction? Altun and Yildiz had compared communicative strategies employed in synchronous CMC when performing different tasks, and found that jigsaw activites were particularly useful in order to encourage interaction and negotiation. Similarly, Nakane, whose presentation on politeness strategies in email exchanges I’m now attending, has found that language use differs depending on topic for discussion, and on whether the students are given formal instruction or not. She also claims that email writing should be part of the language curriculum. This relates to another of the aspects we should keep in mind: What conventions and protocols apply in the media that we choose for interaction, and do we give our students the appropriate training to use them? Some students seem to be completely ICT literate, but we mustn’t forget that we still have students who only have very little experience.