I believe I play close attention to the way my students interact with each other and me; perhaps this is part of my recent obsession with class rapport. Like many communicative approach teachers I expect a lot of uninhibited participation from my students in class as I believe it is conducive to language learning. I also worry about the quality of their participation though, not just the quantity.

I’ve noticed that in western culture there is a belief that student participation in a class is a good thing. Often times teachers don’t even have a clear rationale for the belief that participation leads to learning. Recently I’ve grown more concerned over the cognitive activity inside my students’ heads during my activity than just their vocal participation. Some silent students are actually very active only that their cognitive activity is covert. These students might also be learning the language. The participation I seek is no longer just noise or even risk taking but something internal. I guess I’ve been fortunate enough to have had many very active classes since coming to ELI so now I expect something more than just noise. I have had no problems with reticence this entire year, and in cases where I saw isolated cases, I eventually found that they were capable of speaking when given the appropriate group.

This brings me to one of the things I’ve been experimenting with – the grouping of students in activities. For example, I found that women who might normally be reticent or crowded out in regular groups could actually be extremely active participants in lively and interesting discussions if they were put in a female groups. I guess I found this by default when I had a student who was a Saudi Arabian woman and wouldn’t interact with men in communicative activities. It wasn’t her who was reticent but it was the other Asian women in the class. She brought them out of their shell and elicited their participation extremely well. Often women get crowded out during discussions, especially women who come from cultures in which they rely on the men to speak on their behalf in the public sphere.

Another issue I have been concerned about is the participation of lower level students in groups where they are mixed with learners much higher than them. I worry that they are boring their peers or that their peers will loose patience. I am grateful that I haven’t seen such problems yet. The learners I have had seem to be very patient and sympathetic with one another, perhaps I might even say encouraging. Sometimes a learner won’t get a chance to give his/her say but usually the other members of the group encourage equal participation. Fear that this would not be so caused me to be afraid of letting the students choose who they would like to work with. I usually chose the groups. Recently I took a chance with letting the students choose. I did this partly because I realized that there were certain tensions between some of the students and they didn’t want to be put together. I gave them the choice of not being forced to work together. I was happy to see the results; the students chose to work with people who they felt that they needed more time to get to know. They chose to move to new people with whom they felt more motivated to talk. The results were very positive for the class atmosphere. While the students were set back by my giving them a choice, they seemed to appreciate this.

Most of the time I choose to have the students working together in small groups. I have them spend a lot of time talking to one another and I tend to choose topics and activities that I believe will build rapport. I can say with a lot of confidence that my choices in activities are actually having this effect. My students are very close with one another and seem extremely uninhibited. Even classes of all Asian students had high levels of participation. I must admit that I have had some problems with my current students attitudes towards student small group discussions though. They don’t appreciate the supposed pedagogical value of these activities and don’t see the obvious benefits of increased student speaking time. Fortunately, I have a very small class and have been able to give them the contact with the teacher that they believe they are missing when speaking mainly to their peers. I have chosen to circulate among them and give them more exposure to me. Overall I am convinced that these small group discussions are extremely beneficial in that the students get used to speaking and build confidence that carries into full class interaction too.

One factor that greatly determines the students’ level of participation is their culture. For example, I have a Korean student in my class who participates so actively that it seems more typical of his Latino classmates. Even his style of discourse is decidedly more western. In recent discussions with Koreans about their culture I have found that as long as there are no other Koreans in the class to conform to he will conform to the other students – in this case, Latinos. Furthermore, he is very grateful to be in a class with no other Koreans and I think that the bond he is building with his non-Korean classmates will help him to integrate more later on when many of them are gone. The pattern that he is setting now should last for a while, even against some influence by the Korean society. He seems very pleased with having integrated some and wants to continue. The other example I would have to mention would be the Latino men I have in my class now. My class is hilarious. We spend so much time joking around and chatting. There is very little tension because of them; they cooperate eagerly with many activities, even if they dislike them. They also ask a lot of questions. I might say that they are modeling western behaviors that are essential for my non-western students to learn. The problem is that I have had to learn how to stop them at times. They are hard to stop. I must admit that I loose control of the class at times. Fortunately I believe that my students need to learn how to take control of a conversation in English. Even my Chinese female student has learned how to assertively grab control of a conversation, even if it means boldly and firmly interrupting.

I am very proud of both the quality and quantity of interaction in my class but believe it is not just due to isolated factors such as grouping or activity choice. No one activity can have any predictable effect on a class. In any classroom situation there are so many interacting factors and influences on outcomes. I can say however, that the more I have trusted my students with interaction (even uncontrolled interaction that seemed beyond them) the more they rise to the challenge. I trust them to talk to each other without my pushing them. My activities are often very unstructured even, against much of the conventions for forming discussion groups. What may counter this is that my discussion tasks usually involve some self-revelation and personalization. That is usually motivation enough.