Abstract

The discourse of interaction, Initiation-Response-Feedback (I-R-F) gained its popularity by fostering discussion between the teacher and learners but received critics for developing interactive communication in a controlled manner. With an attempt to provide pragmatic implications for EMI instructors, the study probed into perceptions of students (n=42) from different majors on how two pedagogical approaches (i.e., the I-R-F and the multimodal input of classroom interaction) differed in one EMI Cross-cultural Communication course in one middle-ranked university in Taiwan. The comparative, quasi-experiment research firstly investigated these students’ perceptions of teacher-student interaction for EMI content and language learning and secondly compared their perceptions on the implementation of the multimodal input of classroom interaction against the conventional baseline, the I-R-F. Both quantitative (i.e., survey) and qualitative (i.e., post-lesson student reflection journals and audio recordings) research methods were used. The survey results showed that these students were inclined to engage in extensive and substantial verbal output, expressed the importance of teacher-student interaction for learning the content of the course, and expected chances of lengthy verbal output and corrective feedback from the instructor. The results from students’ journals yielded that the instructor’s use of the multimodal input of classroom interaction significantly outperformed the use of the I-R-F in the categories of effectiveness, the level of student engagement, and the effectiveness of helping them learn the content. Ultimately, it was found that the use of the multimodal input of classroom interaction had triggered their higher-order of cognitive processing more (i.e., analyzing, evaluating, and creating).

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