The Disadvantages of Interact and Suggested Improvements

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the comparative disadvantages of interact, and suggestions for improvement to interact, emerging from Stage I of the two-stage study. Findings from the open-ended section of the survey (Section II) are compared to those elicited from the teacher interviews, and reveal several challenges for interact in practice. The data indicate that several perceptual problems emerge from an understanding that the assessments associated with interact contributed to a high-stakes assessment system. Interact was considered to be highly impractical. Teachers also struggled with understanding what was meant by the expectation that performances should be spontaneous and unrehearsed. Because of its high-stakes nature, students would inevitably wish to do as well as they could on the assessment. This had implications for the extent to which the assessment could measure instances of genuine and unrehearsed spoken interaction as it took place in class. Several suggestions for improvement to interact were proposed.