Teacher-Students’ Interactions in Task-Based vs Form-Focused Instruction

Abstract

Teacher-students’ and students-students’ interactions are of significant importance in foreign language teaching and learning. It is argued that interactions between teachers and students facilitate language development and lead to better language learning. The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of two teaching approaches: 1. Task-Based Instruction (TBI) and 2. Form-Focused Instruction (FFI) on the quantity and quality of teacher-students’ interactions reflected in the number of occurrences of turn taking, question type, feedback and errors correction. Two groups of intermediate-level learners were selected as the participants of this study. One group was instructed by Form-Focused Instruction (FFI) approach and the other class was instructed by Task-Based Instruction (TBI) approach. Results of the statistical analysis of the collected data revealed that FFI approach led to the occurrence of more teacher-students’ interactions than TBI approach. The pedagogical implications are discussed.