Co-teaching to foster Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC): how can co-teaching benefit classroom interactional competence?

Abstract

“Having two teachers leading a classroom opens up many opportunities for students as well as for teachers” (Trites, 2017). At the same time, the class becomes a safe, inclusive and equitable learning environment. According to Walsh (2006), Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) “refers to those features of conversations between the teacher and the students (and among students) which produce high quality interaction and create ‘space for learning’ of the L2” (p. 19). This allows teachers to make conversational adjustments in order to ensure understanding, achieve participation and help learners’ extend and improve their utterances. This paper deals with the outcomes of an experience carried out by four teachers who wanted to analyse if co-teaching (in two different modalities) and the use of CIC strategies provided students with more opportunities to produce good quality output in L2.