Interaction and Dialogue in the CLIL classroom

            I would like to star introducing a question, what is the meaning of language? According to Cambridge Dictionaries is “a system of communication consisting of sounds, words and grammar, or the system of communication used by people in a particular country or type of work”.

Of course language is very important and it is essential for the humans because is the way that we have to communicate with others and also is the way that we use to express our opinions.

  As we could see, language is primordial to human and to society but how the is language used in CLIL classroom by teacher and by the students? In CLIL classrooms the students are able to develop speaking skills; also this classroom provides them the possibility to interact with their classmates and with the teacher. The students have to understand and be able to produce wide range of language early in CLIL and the teacher has to in the best way to develop the spoken and the writing language in their students.  (Bentley, K. 2010)

            Interaction has a main role in the process of teaching- learning. The process of teaching – learning, is relative to the interaction how is produced among the teacher and the students through the language and also through the communicative relation established among them. We can say that the level of communication and how is established among the teachers and their students determines the results in the learning process. If the teacher is able to achieve a good interaction with his students probably he will get an effective learning. (Moral Santaella, C. 2010). 

The first research on the importance and effectiveness of classroom interaction dates from the decades of the 60s and 70s made by Rosenshine and Stevens (1986) and Brophy in the same year.

Ana Llinares writes about the roles of interaction in CLIL classrooms (2013)

 “For many advocates of CLIL, the most important advantage of the approach is that it encourages more meaningful spoken interaction in the classroom than traditional language teaching. Through engaging in cognitively demanding and meaningful activities, students will have more opportunities to communicate in the foreign language, and will be more motivated to do so. While many language teachers do use language-rich, meaningful tasks in the classroom, this is a powerful justification for using a CLIL approach. Yet, the nature of classroom talk in CLIL lessons is not always very well understood by practitioners.”

(Llinares, A. 2013, The roles of interaction in CLIL classrooms, website       Getxolinguae)

 As I believe if we use the interaction in our CLIL classrooms we will get great results because interaction is a good tool to develop the communication and the motivation in our students.

 To develop interaction we can use the dialogue, in a research published by Muijis and Reynolds in 2005 stand out the positive effects of the interactive teaching; using questions with the students, promoting the active participation in the classroom and solving problems in cooperation among all the students. The dialogic dimension has a lot of positive aspects and benefits, for example “some research in L2 has demonstrated how dialogic collaboration among peers can resource a level of achievement which “outstrips ... individual competencies” (Swain 2000:111). Swain’s findings in L2 contexts complement Mercer and Littleton’s (2007) findings in L1 contexts offering reason to believe that the same may be true for CLIL.”                  (Moate, J. 2011, Reconceptualising the Role of Talk in CLIL).

 A dialogic collaboration helps us to give to our students communicative activities, this activities develop social skills because they interact with their classmates also the students develop the collaborative skills, something that is essential in the process of learning and also a skill that they will have for all their lives.

         To sum up, I would like to emphasize the importance of communication and of course how with a good interaction we could get an effective learning. If we use the interaction as a tool to improve the language of our students I am sure that we will have a great result, and if we work in that way our students will be motivated and they will develop collaborative skills, which are a very important skills not only in the school also in the life and for their develop as human.

 Bibliography: 

Books:

•           Llinares, A. Morton, T.  Whittaker, R. (2012), The roles of language in CLIL. Cambridge University Press.
•           Bentley,K. (2010), The TKT course CLIL Module. Cambridge University Press.
•           Moral Santaella, C. (2010), Didáctia, teoría y práctica de la enseñanza. Editorial Pirámide.
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Websites:

•        (Llinares, A. 2013, The roles of interaction in CLIL classrooms, website Getxolinguae)

Articles:

•           Moate,J. (2011). University of Jyväskylä. Reconceptualising the Role of Talk in CLIL, Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies, Vol. 5, 2 , 2011, 17–35.