Peer interaction in the Haitian public school context

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to define peer interaction and its major components. It identifies and examines the major challenges that language teachers in Haiti will face in incorporating peer interaction within the Haitian public school context. It explains the advantages of using peer interaction as a way to generate knowledge. The author concludes by providing practical guidelines and strategies of how to cope with these challenges and describing what he has learned from his research. Since language is learned mainly through interaction with other learners and speakers of that language, this paper aims at persuading Haitian language teachers break out of the traditional ways of language teaching to promote language learning in authentic language environments. After spending seven years learning a language, students find it difficult holding even a five-minute conversation in the target language. If students do not learn the way teachers teach, it is logical that teachers teach the way students learn. One effective technique we can use to reach this goal is peer interaction. With this powerful technique, which allows students take responsibility for their own learning and develop their own inner criteria, they will end up communicating in the target language through interaction with one another