Responding to the variety of learners' characteristics

One of the key factors contributing to the success of language learning is the learners’ active involvement in the classroom interactional activities. One of the ways to promote such active engagement is the teacher’s performance of directive acts, such as eliciting, prompting, giving instructions, checking comprehension, grouping/pairing, nominating, commanding, stimulating, encouraging, offering, asking, etc. to which learners’ responses are either verbal or physical. When learners are frequently active in responding to such acts by comprehending the instructions, producing utterances, or conducting activities, it is more likely that language learning and/or acquisition is effective. This paper tries to describe and explicate teacher’s performance of directive acts which are capable of stimulating learners to be more actively engaged in classroom interaction. Hence, language learning process is more successful.