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This study had two aims. First, it sought to offer a new perspective on interaction by following Larsen-Freeman’s (1997) chaos/complexity theory (C/CT). Second, it set out to examine the types of interactions that occur when movies are used as English teaching materials. In this study, four college student participants received instruction based on the American movie I Feel Pretty (Kohn & Silverstein, 2018). To observe the participants’ interactions, the researchers asked them to complete the following five tasks: describe the movie’s plot, compare it with another similar Korean movie, discuss culture, write a short essay about the movie in English, and discuss multi-word units (MWUs). The first three tasks concerned content and the researchers expected all participants to actively interact with each other when completing them. All the participants actively discussed culture; however, they did not enjoy talking about the other two content-related topics. The final two tasks pertained to language. In completing these tasks, the participants barely interacted with each other and mainly interacted with the teacher. Also, the participants were very interested in learning MWUs. In sum, the participants’ interactions did not match the teacher’s expectations overall, indicating that Larsen-Freeman’s C/CT most persuasively explains interactions in real-life English class situations. |
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