Many teachers follow a communicative approach to 
language teaching to allow their students to practice 
what they are learning.Their students 
may also have negative views of peer interaction.Bringing language skills 
together in this way connects the language that learners 
hear and say with their internal cognitive capacities for 
attending to language, noticing features of the input, and 
forming hypotheses about language use (Swain, 2005).The interactionist approach (Gass & Mackey, 
2006), for example, explains that when language learners 
are engaged in meaningful communication in a second 
language, they are able to focus on meaning, negotiate 
to make input comprehensible, and try out new language 
forms as they produce language. Similarly, sociocultural approaches to language teaching 
point out that in interaction, learners receive help (from 
their interlocutor) while producing language, allowing 
them to express ideas they could not put into words on 
their own.In interactions with skilled language 
teachers, they also obtain expert scaffolding (assistance with 
words or grammar) to help them express meanings they 
cannot formulate on their own.As such, interaction is a mini-laboratory for language 
use - allowing learners to make discoveries about their 
new language as they use it to communicate their ideas.Current 
theories of language teaching and learning underscore 
this point.