The Role of Classroom Interaction in Second Language Oral Acquisition: A Case Study of Primary English Education

Abstract

With the new standards of the English curriculum, primary school English teaching places greater emphasis on developing students’ oral expression and communicative competence. According to the Input-Interaction-Output Hypothesis in classroom contexts, it is the interaction in the classroom that is essential in driving the language input, the meaning negotiation and the language output, which is the output of the students. This study focuses on primary school English classrooms and examines how classroom interaction influences students’ oral English development within the framework of second language acquisition (SLA) theory. The study conducts a systematic literature review and synthesis of research on classroom interaction in primary school English within domains of domestic and international studies based on the literature analysis and case study of the past decade summarising the principal characteristics of interactions, as well as the factors that influence these interactions. This study explores the theoretical and practical roles and significance of classroom interaction in second language acquisition. The results show that the effective use of high-quality teacher-students interaction and peer-student collaboration can improve oral proficiency and motivation towards learning among students; this provides valuable insights for optimizing primary school English teaching models.