Teaching through Peer Interaction prepares teachers to use peer communication in the classroom. It presents current research of peer interaction and language learning for teachers, including background on the role of peer interaction in classroom language learning, guidelines for adopting and adapting peer interaction opportunities in real classrooms, and perspectives on teachers’ frequently expressed concerns and questions about peer interaction.
Practical and comprehensive, this text brings together information on peer communication across the different skill areas, for different learners, in different contexts, and includes discussion on assessment. The text is replete with sample activities, tasks, and instructional sequences to aid teachers' understanding of how to use peer interaction effectively in a range of classroom settings, making it the ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in language education programs, as well as in-service teachers.
Table of Contents
1: Peer interaction and language learning
2: Why use peer interaction in the language classroom?
3: How does language learning happen in peer interaction?
4: Peer interaction for speaking and listening
5: Peer interaction for reading and writing
6: Peer interaction and the future of language teaching
7: The teacher’s role in peer interaction
8: Teacher concerns with peer interaction
9: Guidelines for implementing peer interaction
Biography
Rebecca Adams, PhD., is an assistant professor of Applied Linguistics in the English Department of the University of Memphis, USA.
Rhonda Oliver is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Head of the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia.
"'doing peer interaction is a balancing act'…
Bravo for a highly readable and practical guide to the use of peer interaction in language classrooms! With long and varied experience as teachers and researchers, Rhonda Oliver and Rebecca Adams are a brilliant team – they know what it’s like to juggle language learners working together. What I love are the classroom vignettes that bring alive the many varied contexts and challenges of peer interaction for teacher and their students – and the strategies to match!"
Jenefer Philp, Lancaster University, UK.
"Finally, a principled, informative, teacher-friendly, student-appropriate guide to teaching through peer interaction in the language classroom. This book needed to be written – bravo to Rebecca Adams and Rhonda Oliver for doing so, and for seamlessly drawing on a wealth of applied linguistics scholarship in this important area of pedagogy."
Jonathan Newton, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
"Adams and Oliver present a state-of-the art, comprehensive exploration of peer interaction as a context for language learning. Their work moves seamlessly between theoretical explanations and pedagogical implications, providing concrete examples of instructional contexts where peer interaction has been used, and critically examining conventional wisdom about its strengths and limitations. As such, this book serves both as an essential guide for language teachers who want to understand how peer interaction might improve their classroom practices, as well as an engaging tool for researchers seeking fruitful paths for further investigation."
Paul D. Toth, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
