Teacher Talking Time

Teacher Talking Time, or TTT, is considered a valuable tool in a Language class if used correctly, and in this case correctly means moderately. 
It is of course necessary that a teacher talks to his or her students in order to elicit interest for what is to be taught, to explain, to clarify when students are in doubt, to keep the interest high, but if TTT is abused then our students' interest fades easily and quickly, and I know because it has happened to me more often than not. I have no problem in confessing that I am more the "lecturer" type of teacher, but I also have no problem in recognizing that new times require different approaches. It is a must to have our students practice as much as they can, only that practice should not be executed blindly. The teacher must always play a key role in identifying what best suits the interests and goals of his or her class.
What can a teacher do? The answer should be obvious, but here it is again: let's have the students talk (it is after all a Language class). Maximizing our students' talking time can be
achieved through many different activities, and the most commonly used is Interviewing each other, and then, students have to report to the rest of the class what each student learnt about his or her partner (all students should take notes of their partners' responses in order to do this properly). Also such reporting should ideally lead to a lively exchange of sorts among all of the members of the class and only in the Teacher-Student lock.
Actually, what is really happening is that the teacher is monitoring the activity and at the    same time taking notes of what information he can get. An informal assessment sould also be another of the objectives of this activity, and students should be made aware they are being evaluated and that should not constitute a problem, after all the best evaluations are those who do not necessarily look like real evaluations (my former boss +Peter James Harrington taught me that).

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