D) Summarize in your own words what you believe to be the best technique for interviewing people (see Appendix, p. 292).

 

11. Read the following extract on the use of interviews in the foreign lan­guage classroom:

 

The success of an interview depends both on the skill of the interviewer, on his ability to ask the right kinds of questions, to insist and interpret, and on the willingness to talk on the part of the person being interviewed. Both partners in an interview should be good at listening so that a question-and-answer sequence develops into a conversation.

In the foreign language classroom interviews are useful not only because they force students to listen carefully but also be­cause they are so versatile in their subject matter.

Before you use an interview in your class make sure that the students can use the necessary question-and-answer struc­tures. A few sample sentences on the board may be a help for the less able.

As a rule students should make some notes on the ques­tions they are going to ask and on the answers they get. If they write down all the questions in detail beforehand they have a questionnaire. Survey with the help of a questionnaire is one of the easiest ways of interviewing people.