The impact of the interactive whiteboard on the teacher and children’s language use in an ESL immersion classroom

As a teaching resource, interactive whiteboards (IWB) are becoming increasingly popular in schools outside the UK, including Spain. Research carried out so far has tended to examine the effects of IWB use on teaching and learning in monolingual contexts where English is the first language for learners. The present study adds a new dimension to available work by analysing the influence of the IWB on the language use of a primary school teacher and a group of native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) children in an English language immersion classroom. The study reveals that while the teacher used the IWB to support the children’s learning by taking advantage of multimedia presentations in Numeracy and Literacy and by creating opportunities for the children to engage in tactile interaction with the board, opportunities to participate in the dialogic interaction beyond the production of one or two word utterances were much more limited and largely restricted to the NS children in the group. Since the failure to promote verbal interaction has important implications for the NNS pupils in the class, it is suggested that teacher education programmes should focus on developing teachers’ classroom interactional competence as well as their technological skills.