Input and interaction: Tips to improve your students’ SLA

 Input and interaction: Tips to improve your students’ SLA

By Ma. De Los Angeles Mendoza González

 

     We know that teaching can be a kind of hard, there are many elements involved in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) process. Don´t worry, in this paper, you will find some advice to help you improve your students’ SLA based on input and interaction.

 

Input and interaction

 

     Very well, but… What is input? Input is any oral or written content that the students are exposed to according to their learning level. The input can be varied according to the students´ needs and the objectives of the lesson plan.

 

The interaction is the result of the input, there is always an interaction between the

teacher and the student, but also the students must interact with their classmates and with other people in the classroom or outside.

 

Here are some tips to improve your student´s performance:

 

• ·         The input must be planned according to the students’ level. The input needs to generate             interaction
• ·                      The input can be obtained from pedagogic and authentic materials and books.
• ·         The input involves the teacher talk, foreign talk, and interlanguage talk, which is the one that the student generates when learning.

Some of the inputs, you can use to have your students interested in your class and promote the interaction.

 

1. a)    Playing card games. These games can be played individually, in pairs or groups, in the physical or online way and are very useful to help students learn and remember vocabulary, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and more.

 

1. b)    Sketches. Give your students cards with some instructions and let them organize, assign roles, write the dialogues, and perform.

1. c)    Interview. The students make teams and write questions, then they record the interview. Also, the students can pretend they are some famous people, and their classmates can ask questions and interact funnily.

 

1. d)    Send messages. Ask the students to record messages and send them to their classmates, then the students who received the message must do or answer the activity or question he/she understood.

 

1. e)    Watch/listen to a short video or song, then make teams and ask students to recreate some scenes or sing the song with their own words.

 

 

 

1. f)     Real situations. Make teams. Then, give the students a situation in a specific context. Then, tell them to participate with their classmates to solve the problem or give ideas about how to act in the situation (for example, going to the bank, going shopping, trying clothes, cooking, etc.)

 

   

 

      Remember that the input must be necessary and sufficient for L2 acquisition. It is important that the input can be comprehensible so the students can communicate and socialize. Also, the input must be presented according to each group of students' levels and monitors the activity and the student's participation to give feedback and motivate them to acquire the language in an effective way. 

 

 

 

References

Hockly, N., De  Prada, E. (2020) Chapter 3 Input, interaction, and context. IEXPRO University. Class Anthology.

.           Retrieved in

Chromeextension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://selmaestriasvirtual2.universidadiexpro.mx/pluginfile.php/25813/mod_assign/introattacment/0/Chapter%201.%20Interlanguage.pdf?forcedownload

Maharsi, I. (2011) The importance of input and interaction in second language acquisition. Journal of English and Education, Vol 5 No. 1

Retrieved in httpps://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://journal.uii.ac.id/JEE/article/download/4459/3941

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