Strategies to promote interaction

Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate how teachers use strategies to promote interaction. It is our ambition to find out how teachers perceive interaction and how they think their students may benefit from their use of strategies. The sociocultural theory on learning is used as a theoretical framework for this study. This framework aligns with our research questions as well as the prior research that we present. Prior research suggeststhat in order for the students to develop a foreign language they need to be provided with an authentic context and a variety of opportunities to interact. We conducted three semi-structured interviews with qualified teachers teaching at primary school level. Our gathered results are presented under four different themes connected to our research questions. The results show that these teachers reported using strategies mostly as scaffolding and were somewhat unaware of how to define a strategy. Also, the teachers’ perception of interaction did not always align with prior research. Moreover, research suggests that students need to be taught communicative strategies explicitly in order to implement these when solving problems. Our results show that in order for this to happen the teachers need to use strategies more frequently during lessons. The major conclusions of this study are that the educators we interviewed, did not focus on using strategies as much as researchers suggest theyshould. Also, there was a misconception of what defines as interaction and we got the idea that the educators thought that planning lessons with a focus on interaction and strategies were more time consuming than using the English textbook.