Teacher strategies in facilitating students' interactional communication through seating arrangement

Classroom interaction is such crucial thing in any education level. It is interaction between the participants in the classroom. International communication theory suggests that seating arrangement can give impact to the teacher how to communicate with the students, how students interact each other, impacting engagement and focus. This qualitative study aims to investigate the teachers’ strategy in facilitating students’ interactional communication through seating arrangement at MAN Surabaya and the problems in facilitating interactional communication through seating arrangement. This study used classroom observation and interview to obtain the data with 2 English teachers in. The result of the study shows that there are two kinds of seating arrangement used by the English teacher to facilitate classroom interaction during English teaching and learning process. Those are orderly row and modular seating arrangement. The finding shows that out of three common of seating arrangements suggested by James and Rod. Furthermore, the interactions mostly happened in both seating arrangements are teacher-students and student-student. Moreover the study highlighted the problems both seating arrangement are increasing noise level, uneven distribution interaction among class, increasing discipline problem, hard to handle spread all over and decreasing classroom discussion. So, the teachers should consider to use kinds of seating arrangement in facilitating students’ interaction in English classroom.