Page 126 - Beyond Methods

114 Facilitating negotiated interaction
emphasized here: active participation by learners in meaningful in- teraction, and appropriate mediational assistance from competent speakers.
It is beneficial to compare Vygotsky’s ZPD and Krashen’s i + 1. Although they may bear superficial resemblance to each other, there are significant differences. To begin with, Krashen’s i + 1 is an input construct; Vygotsky’s ZPD is an interactional construct. For Krashen, learners’ movement from current level to the next level of language development marks a linear progression along a pre- dictable order of sequence. For Vygotsky, such a movement is cycli- cal, organic, and unpredictable. For Krashen, the movement depends largely on the comprehensible input provided by the speaker. For Vygotsky, the movement depends largely on the richness of inter- actional experiences of the hearer. As Ellis (1999, p. 20) succinctly summarizes: in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, “interaction is not just a device that facilitates learners’ movement along the interlan- guage continuum, but a social event which helps learners participate in their own development, including shaping the path it follows.”
Reflective task 5.4
If the promotion of negotiated interaction demands serious attention to the individual and social factors, what do you think teachers have to do to re- orient their classroom input and interaction? One way of addressing this question is to think about a lesson you have been recently associated with (either as a teacher or as a student-teacher) and determine what qualitative changes would have to be made to make input and interaction in that class sensitive to the individual and social factors.
Impact on Language Teaching
Helping learners participate in their own language development and shape their own path should indeed be the prime responsibility of the classroom teacher. What can help the teacher in carrying out such a responsibility is promotion of negotiated interaction. Based on the above discussion, I would like to suggest that negotiated inter- action is a matter of coming to grips with all three—textual, inter-