Authentic Oral Interaction in the EFL Class:
What It Means, What It Does not

La interacción oral auténtica en la clase de inglés:
lo que significa y lo que no

The communicative approach in EFL education has generated a concern for the development of communication in the foreign language classroom within which the promotion of oral interaction is usually paramount. However, what constitutes authentic oral interaction is sometimes not clearly understood and some of the activities that take place in the classroom seem unlikely to generate meaningful opportunities for the development of oral interaction. To address this gap, this paper characterizes four samples of oral communication exchanges that occur in Colombian EFL secondary school classrooms in Monteria and discusses their effectiveness for developing meaningful oral production in both student-student and teacher-student interaction. The paper has two main sections: the first is devoted to the analysis of student-student interaction, and the second to discussing teacherstudent exchanges.

Key words: Oral interaction, English as a Foreign Language (EFL), oral production

El enfoque comunicativo en la enseñanza del inglés como lengua extranjera ha generado una preocupación por el desarrollo de la comunicación en el aula de clases, en la cual se da gran importancia a la interacción oral. Sin embargo, aún se entiende poco lo que constituye la interacción oral autentica y por ello las actividades de aprendizaje generan pocas oportunidades significativas para el desarrollo de la interacción oral. Por ello, el presente artículo caracteriza cuatro ejemplos de interacción oral comunes a las aulas de inglés de escuelas públicas de Montería, Colombia y discute su efectividad para desarrollar una producción oral significativa en la interacción estudiante-estudiante y profesor-estudiante. El artículo tiene dos secciones: la primera se encarga del análisis de la interacción estudiante-estudiante, la segunda discute la interacción profesor-estudiante.

Palabras clave: interacción oral, inglés como lengua extranjera (ILE), producción oral

The development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has brought with it a great variety of activities for promoting oral communication in the EFL classroom. I am sure that many of us are acquainted with an array of terms like tasks, role plays and simulations, project work, conversation strategies, dialogues, presentations, and many other activities that we call communicative and that we have used in our role as in-service or pre-service teachers to promote oral communication. The use of these activities, we assume, renders our teaching practice 'communicative' and so, when asked how we teach, we usually say we use the communicative approach, or that we develop oral communicative competence in our classrooms. However, have we ever wondered about what we understand by oral communication and its characteristics? Is it the dialogue students speak in front of their classmates based on a prepared script? Is it the oral presentation they make about a particular topic? Is it the uttering of model sentences based on patterns provided by the teacher? Are all those activities equally successful in developing communication?

The objective of this paper will be to provide an informed discussion of what authentic oral communication involves and the possibilities it has in the EFL classroom. In doing so I will explore both student-student and teacher-student interaction as they presently occur in classrooms and describe them in terms of their conformity to what can be called authentic oral communication. My central argument will be that both the studentstudent and teacher-student interactions that usually occur in EFL lessons, represented by what I have called the 'script-based dialogue' and by the IRF exchange (Initiation-Response-Followup), resemble authentic oral communication very little and thus seem unlikely to generate meaningful opportunities for the development of foreign language proficiency.

The discussion that follows will be based on observation and transcriptions coming from state, secondary school classrooms in Monteria (Colombia). The usual learning conditions within these classrooms imply a scarcity of technological, bibliographical, and material resources; they also imply large classes and teacher-centered instruction, where the primary source of oral language is the teacher him/herself. The data I will use have been collected mainly through non-participant, unstructured observations and audio recordings, and are part of an ongoing action research project about the development of communication standards and citizenship through the use of tasks (task-based learning). The discussion is organized into three main sections: in the first one, the main theoretical issues that inform the paper will be briefly presented. In the next section two types of student-student interaction will be analyzed in terms of their value for developing EFL conversational skills. In the last section, teacher-student interaction is given a close look considering, equally, how it seems to promote or hinder the growth of these skills.

This short section deals with the main theoretical aspects that underlie the discussion presented in this paper. However, rather than explaining them in detail here, I have opted for a brief, general explanation of each one. The reason for this is that almost all these theoretical issues will be retaken throughout the paper and discussed in more detail as they are weaved with classroom interaction data. In this way, I hope to be able to make my points clearer and sufficiently grounded.

One current issue in EFL education comes from the discussion of how human beings appear to become part of their cultural system and the role learning plays in this process. Outstanding within this discussion is the work of Lev Vygotsky (1978) and his ideas about the culturally and socially mediated nature of human cognition (Lantolf, 2000). The main assumption of this theory is that "individual development must be understood in, and cannot be separated from, its cultural and cultural-historical context" (Rogoff, 2003, p. 50). In this view, the social and the psychological interact in meaningful ways and create each other. Another important concept from the Vygotskian legacy is the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The idea behind this concept is that learners become able to do things when they are provided help by more mature, knowledgeable or skilled peers with tasks that otherwise they would not be able to accomplish alone (Van Lier, 2004). In a developmental sense, the support gained through the interaction extends learners' ability, pulling them to higher levels of performance. The extension of these two powerful ideas for the field of EFL has led to a wide recognition of EFL learning as increasing participation in activities or situations when the language is used.

In this view of EFL learning, the concept of interaction has gained increased recognition over the past decades. A pioneer in this area is Long (1983), who stated in his interaction hypothesis that opportunities to attend to form during negotiated interaction were conducive to language learning. Several reasons that support this hypothesis include the assumptions that learners receive feedback on their production during negotiated interaction and that they have opportunities to modify their output, or oral language production, during this negotiation (Long, 1996). This concern for interaction has also been expressed by other authors (Ellis, 2003; Hall & Verplaetse, 2000; Kumaravadivelu, 2003; Pica, Lincoln-Porter, Paninos, & Linnell, 1996; Van Lier, 1996), who see it as a fundamental condition for second and foreign language learning. It is in this broad area of knowledge and research that the subsequent discussion and characterization of authentic oral communication in the EFL class fit.

Teacher-student interaction is an important source of EFL learning in the classroom. Given the conditions of most of our state schools where scarcity of resources makes it difficult to expose students to oral samples of the foreign language, the use of English by the teacher becomes a tremendously important source, if not the most important, of real foreign language use. In this part of the paper I will concentrate on two different types of teacher-student interaction and will analyze their potential for promoting meaningful EFL learning within the framework of authentic oral communication as described above. The first type corresponds to what has been called an IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975, cited in Van Lier, 1996); the second, to a pedagogical conversation (Van Lier, 1996) by the teacher and students. Both types will be discussed using two samples of teacher-student interaction. The first comes from my own data on secondary school classroom interaction in the Colombian context; the second comes from Seedhouse (2007).

Interaction Sample No. 3: The irf Exchange

In their influential work on the analysis of classroom discourse, Sinclair & Coulthard (1975, cited in Nassaji & Wells, 2000) characterized the IRF exchange (which stems from initiationresponse- follow up) as the most common type of interaction that is found in classrooms. This exchange usually takes place in teacher-student interaction and has been described as a "closed rather than an open discourse format..." (Van Lier, 1996, p. 152), due to the fact that it limits the learner's participation to one turn (the second turn or response) and hems it in between the eliciting turn (the first turn or initiation) and the evaluative one (the third turn, follow up or feedback)². The characteristics of this type of interaction are summarized by Van Lier (1996, p. 153), whom I quote fully here:

In recent years, the validity of the IRF exchange has been revisited and deeply discussed. For example, Nassaji & Wells (2000) present a detailed account of the different configurations and possibilities the IRF offers for learning. One important conclusion of their study is that the IRF is not necessarily a useless exchange and might have learning potential when the third turn (the F turn) is conceived as open and not evaluative (that's why they call the F move Follow-up rather than feedback). However, for the present discussion I will concentrate on a configuration of the IRF exchange as including a Feedback, evaluative move. This stems from the pervasive nature of the evaluative move in the lessons I have had the chance to observe.

An example of the IRF exchange from a sixth grade lesson on the topic of routines and times, with the F-move in the evaluative function, is presented below (Table 3).

The example illustrates a common event in the EFL class. In fact, it is so common that it has come to dominate teacher-student interaction in many of the lessons I have had the chance to observe. The first IRF exchange occurs between turns 1 and 3: the teacher starts by asking the question "What time...What time... do you get up?" (the eliciting turn or initiation), and the student provides an answer to that question saying "I get up at six o'clock" (the response), and in the third turn the teacher gives her feedback or evaluation with "very good" (the feedback, or follow up). This pattern is repeated from turns 3 to 8, 9 to 13, and 14 to 16.

Despite its common use in the EFL class, this type of interaction has several implications that, in my opinion, limit rather than propel meaningful learning. The first one has to do with the amount of student talk it promotes. As can be seen in the example, the teacher dominates the talk to a point that she produces 62.5% of the participation (10 out of 16 turns). This leaves the 35 students she has with only 37.5% of the chances to use the language orally. Following a very simplistic but logical equation, the more chances students have to use the language orally, the more opportunities they might have for developing their oral communication abilities. However, that is not the case in this example where student participation is significantly reduced, nor is it the case in some of the different studies where teacher-student interaction has been analyzed and where the IRF exchange usually accounts for two thirds of the total interaction (Van Lier, 1996) that occurs in a classroom.

Another issue worth analyzing has to do with the roles each one of the participants of the exchange assumes in the talk. In the example, the teacher is the one who always initiates the talk, as is evident in turns 1, 8 and 13, where she asks different students the question, 'What time do you get up?'. She also fulfils the roles of a) reuttering, or re-casting, what students say (turns 3, 10 and 16) in order to acknowledge their participation; b) evaluating students' answers by accepting (turns 3 and 15: 'very good') or rejecting them (turns 5 and 7, 'no, not at six'); c) deciding who is supposed to talk (turns 1, 8, and 13 where she nominates participants), and d) deciding the course the interaction will follow (turn 16, 'now... let's continue'). The students, on the other hand, are left with the role of providing only an answer to the teacher's elicitations (turns 2, 4, 6, 9 and 11). The fact that it is the teacher who manages the talk by assuming different roles, and in doing so uses language to fulfill varied communicative functions, leaves the learner with scarce opportunities to use the language communicatively and for different purposes, thus reducing the amount and variety of EFL practice in the classroom.

In terms of spontaneity, content relevance, promotion of automaticity, and the coupling of form and meaning, this piece of interaction seems to have the same problems discussed in the previous section for student-student interaction. Namely, that the third turns of the IRF instances are evaluative- something very rare in authentic conversation; the conversation is not oriented towards exchanging meaningful relevant contents, but towards verifying knowledge (grammar and pronunciation); and finally, answers and questions do not appear to flow in an automatic fashion, appropriately coupled one to the other in a contingent way, but in jumps from verifying form to exchanging meaning. These reasons, then, seem to make this piece of interaction unrealistic and thus barely significant for the development of foreign language proficiency.

One final issue worth considering in this analysis has to do with conversational symmetry (Van Lier, 1996). This aspect refers to how the rights and responsibilities are distributed in the conversation. That is to say, each of the participants has the right to decide when to talk and what to say³ and is not told when to talk or what to say. In the EFL classroom it is usually the teacher who makes the decision of who talks next and what he/she should talk about, but this is something that does not usually happen in real talk. In our example, the teacher is 'the one in charge' and tells the students when to talk and what to say. Although it is the teacher's responsibility to guarantee that the interaction flows in an orderly way, exercising too much control through this type of interaction might generate students' reluctance to participate and thus result in less motivation, not to mention the implications it might have for the distribution of power and the perpetuation of the status quo in the classroom (Lemke, 1990, cited in Nassaji & Wells, 2000).

Although the IRF exchange is the most common type of interaction that occurs in the EFL class, it is not the only one. There are other types of interaction whose characteristics seem to contribute more successfully to developing language learning. One of them is the type of interaction Van Lier (1996) calls the 'pedagogical conversation', or contingent interaction. I will describe it in the following subsection.

Interaction Sample No. 4: Contingent Interaction

Contrary to the IRF exchange, contingent interaction seems to be related to the concept of conversation. In Van Lier's terms, conversation is aimed at the construction of communicative symmetry, or equal (or at least almost equal) "distribution of rights and duties in the talk" (1996, p. 175). In contingent interaction there is no certainty as regards the direction the talk will take, for it depends on the local, moment-to-moment positions and contributions of each of the participants. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it,

Relating the concept of contingent interaction to the way proficiency grows, it is possible to say that it is in contingent interaction where "language provides affordances that engage learners" (Van Lier, 1996, p. 171); that is, where learning opportunities are created and learners take advantage of them. In this way, the complex set of processes that underpin L2 learning might be more effectively activated.

Before we go on, let us see an example⁴. The teacher has been asking learners to talk about their favorite movies when one of the learners introduces a topic within the flow of the talk.

This piece of interaction is different from the first one we studied (the IRF exchange) and, in my opinion as well as that of several authors (Seedhouse, 2007; Van Lier, 1996; Wood, 1988), seems to have important implications for the development of foreign language proficiency and learning in general. One such implication comes from the fact that in this example the student's amount of talk is higher and richer than in example 3. In this case, the student's amount of talk constitutes 50% of the turns, which means that the students might have more opportunities for using the language in communication.

The above is also related to the fact that it is no longer the teacher who starts topics or expands on them. As could be seen in the example, the learner initiates the talk about Kung fu (turn 1), takes it in the direction he wants (his fighting abilities, turn 5), is 'primary knower'⁵ of the information (turns 3, 5 and 9) and uses what the teacher says to build his own talk. This interaction seems to be more symmetric than what happens in example 3 and, as a result, is some steps ahead in the process of developing EFL learning.

One additional point of discussion is that it is the learner who initiates the talk or proposes a topic for discussion (turn 1). The teacher then steers towards the student's utterance and asks a genuine question about it (turn 2, Kung fu? You like the movie Kung fu?); that is, the teacher is truly interested in the information he is asking for and, contrary to the IRF exchange, does not know the answer in advance (he is no longer 'primary knower'). This causes the exchange to develop in a more realistic way for the teacher and student are sharing true information and are interested in doing so because the teacher is not evaluating the student's contribution but commenting on it and subtly helping the learner construct what he wants to say. Additionally, in the example above, the talk started by the student's presentation of his favorite movie and ended up in an exchange about his fighting abilities, with the joke the teacher makes in turn 10. This, in Vygotsky's words, means that the dynamics of the situation took care of the course the talk followed, of its unpredictability. This exemplifies one of the characteristics of contingent interaction, if not the most salient.

Following Seedhouse's (2007) analysis of this same excerpt, it is important to note that the student's grammatical resources are fairly limited, but this does not impede him from initiating the talk (turn 1), developing it (turn 3) and turning the discussion to his fighting abilities (turn 5). We can also see how the student "very skillfully manages to co-construct meaning with T in the L2 from his limited grammatical resources" (turn 12). What this shows is that students can in fact not only initiate talk in the classroom and contribute to developing conversation, but can do so with a very few linguistic resources, which contradicts one of the teacher's most common complaints when developing oral communication in the EFL class; namely, that students cannot talk because they do not know enough vocabulary and grammar.

This kind of interaction could be related to Wood's (1988) concept of contingent teaching, or Van Lier's (1996) 'pedagogical conversation', both of which refer to teaching that assists performance through the pacing of help based on the child's contributions to the interaction. It falls also within the conception of human development as the transformation of participation in sociocultural activity (Rogoff, 2003) and within the ZPD (Vygotsky, 1978) that Ohta (2000, cited in Seedhouse, 2007) contextualized in relation to second language acquisition as "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by individual linguistic production, and the level of potential development as determined through language produced collaboratively with a teacher or peer" (p. 9).

In transcript 4, and following again Seedhouse's (2007, p. 13) analysis, the learner's actual developmental level can be seen in turn 3 with the telegraphic utterance "yeah... fight", which the teacher expands to the native-like form "You know how to fight with your hands?" in turn 6. Thanks to the teacher's embedded support, the learner starts producing more elaborated utterances that seem to be moving up the scale and signal the area of potential development. This is the case of "I fight... my hand" (turn 5) and "I fight with my hand" (turn 7), which are very likely the result of the learner's noticing and subsequent uptake of the teacher's embedded correction and of the scaffold he has constructed through his interaction⁶.

Based on the previous two examples, it can be said that the IRF exchange seems a limited and limiting interactional format that encourages very little participation on the part of the learner and, as a result, reduces the possibilities for learning the foreign language. Contingent interaction, on the other hand, seems to open possibilities for a more symmetric, meaningful, realistic, and effective interactional mode in the pursuit of EFL proficiency.

In this paper I have tried to show the different aspects that seem to account for what can be called authentic oral communication in the EFL classroom. In order to do so I have presented and contrasted different examples of teacher-student interaction in teacher-centered lessons and student-student interaction in a script-based dialogue and in a contingent conversation based on a survey task. My main claim has been that both the script-based dialogue and the teacher-student IRF interaction have very little to offer in terms of EFL proficiency growth. I do not mean by this, however, that they should be banned from the language classroom nor that they are a waste of time for both students and teachers. I think they retain some value in terms of pronunciation practice, confidence in handling the sounds of the language, and perhaps motivation, for the first case, as well as controlled language practice and the keeping of an orderly lesson for the second.

The major reasons that support my position have to do with the authenticity, content relevance, contingency and symmetry of language use and of the language use situation in both cases (Halliday, 1994; Van Lier, 1996, 2004). As was argued, for oral communication to be authentic there need to be a considerable degree of spontaneity and a true exchange of meaning to which the interacting parties are oriented and in which they are interested. Additionally, when the interaction gives no room for the uncertain, for managing it in terms of its linguistic realizations and its topic, little opportunities are offered for students to develop automatic language use and thus make appropriate, online matching of form and meaning. Additionally, we have seen that unauthentic communication usually provides a variety of language use roles for the teacher, relegating students to passive members of the language exchange.

Through the discussion of the different situations that were presented above I have also tried to put together a set of basic criteria for making informed pedagogical and practical decisions as regards what constitutes communication in the foreign language class and of the way we shape, choose or adapt our EFL learning activities. In this way, I think, we can better tune the activities we design or choose in order to suit both students' needs and the demands that the language learning process poses. Although my emphasis has been on the secondary school classroom, the proposed criteria might equally serve the purposes of more demanding EFL or ESL teaching situations.

The occurrence of contingent interaction or pedagogical conversation in English in the EFL learning contexts I have had access to is extremely scarce. This means that an appealing research path to follow would be to look for pedagogical strategies to engage both teacher and students in learning to generate conversations in English within the classroom. The path is a challenging one, given the conditions in which EFL learning takes place in our contexts, but that makes it more fascinating.

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José David Herazo Rivera is a full time teacher at Universidad de Cordoba, Monteria, Colombia. He holds a master's degree in education and is currently a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh (USA). He co-authored the series Keynote Tests. Research interests include Task-based language teaching, classroom interaction, and EFL learning from a sociocultural perspective.