Book Review: Interaction Online, Lindsay Clandfield and Jill Hadfield

by Philip Kerr

More and more language learning is taking place, fully or partially, on online platforms and the affordances of these platforms for communicative interaction are exciting. Unfortunately, most platform-based language learning experiences are a relentless diet of drag-and-drop, drag-till-you-drop grammar or vocabulary gap-filling. The chat rooms and discussion forums that the platforms incorporate are underused or ignored. Lindsay Clandfield and Jill Hadfield’s new book is intended to promote online interaction between and among learners and the instructor, rather than between learners and software.  

Interaction Online is a recipe book, containing about 80 different activities (many more if you consider the suggested variations). Subtitled ‘Creative activities for blended learning’, the authors have selected and designed the activities so that any teacher using any degree of blend (from platform-based instruction to occasional online homework) will be able to use them. The activities do not depend on any particular piece of software, as they are all designed for basic tools like Facebook, Skype and chat rooms. Indeed, almost every single activity could be used, sometimes with some slight modification, for teachers in face-to-face settings. 

A recipe book must be judged on the quality of the activities it contains, and the standard here is high. They range from relatively simple, short activities to much longer tasks which will need an hour or more to complete. An example of the former is a sentence-completion activity (‘Don’t you hate / love it when ….?’ – activity 2.5). As an example of the latter, there is a complex problem-solving information-gap where students have to work out the solution to a mystery (activity 6.13), an activity which reminds me of some of the material in Jill Hadfield’s much-loved Communication Games books.  

In common with many recipe books, Interaction Online is not an easy book to use, in the sense that it is hard to navigate. The authors have divided up the tasks into five kinds of interaction (personal, factual, creative, critical and fanciful), but it is not always clear precisely why one activity has been assigned to one category rather than another. In any case, the kind of interaction is likely to be less important to many teachers than the kind and amount of language that will be generated (among other considerations), and the table of contents is less than helpful. The index at the back of the book helps to some extent, but a clearer tabulation of activities by interaction type, level, time required, topic and language focus (if any) would be very welcome. Teachers will need to devise their own system of referencing so that they can easily find activities they want to try out. 

Again, like many recipe books, Interaction Online is a mix of generic task-types and activities that will only work with the supporting materials that are provided. Teachers will enjoy the latter, but will want to experiment with the former and it is these generic task-types that they are most likely to add to their repertoire. In activity 2.7 (‘Foodies’ – personal interaction), for example, students post pictures of items of food and drink, to which other students must respond with questions. The procedure is clear and effective, but, as the authors note, the pictures could be of practically anything. ‘From pictures to questions’ might be a better title for the activity than ‘Foodies’. Similarly, activity 3.4 (‘Find a festival’ – factual interaction) uses a topic (‘festivals’), rather than a picture, to generate questions and responses. The procedure is slightly different from activity 2.7, but the interactional procedures of the two activities could be swapped around as easily as the topics could be changed. 

Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is the variety of interactional procedures that is suggested. The majority of activities contain (1) suggestions for a stimulus, (2) suggestions for managing initial responses to this stimulus, and (3) suggestions for further interaction. As readers work their way through the book, they will be struck by similarities between the activities. The final chapter (chapter 8: ‘Task design’) provides an excellent summary of the possibilities of communicative online interaction, and more experienced teachers may want to read this chapter first.  

Chapter 7 provides a useful, but necessarily fairly brief, overview of considerations regarding feedback and assessment 

Overall, Interaction Online is a very rich resource, and one that will be best mined in multiple visits. For most readers, I would suggest an initial flick through and a cherry-picking of a small number of activities to try out. For materials writers and course designers, a better starting point may be the final two chapters, followed by a sampling of activities. For everyone, though, Online Interaction is a powerful reminder that technology-assisted language learning could and should be far more than what is usually is. 

Author’s Bio: Philip Kerr was a director of studies at International House schools in Spain (1980s) and London (1990s). He is now a teacher trainer and ELT materials writer, and lives in Vienna. His publications include the coursebook series, Straightforward and Inside Out (both Macmillan), and the award-winning Translation and Own-Language Activities (CUP).

References Interaction Online, by Lindsay Clandfield and Jill Hadfield  Cambridge University Press, 2017, £27.40 (+VAT)