First of all, I strongly agree with the notion of instructors should first think about why

they are teaching what they are teaching or the goal/importance of teaching certain
knowledge, which was mentioned several times in the video. English throughout the world has
various dialects and there are many types of language learning (e.g.: ESL, EFL, ESP, etc.) but
our time to study language(s) is limited, hence knowing what the learners needs are and
developing a curriculum that precisely targets their demands is crucially important to both
meeting the gaps between what they need or want to conduct and what they are able to conduct
as well as learning the target language efficiently.
On the other hand, I think these discussions in this video are based on the assumption that
the population of the target language classroom stays in a relatively smaller number, which
means the theories might not be applicable in a classroom that consists a large amount of
students. Pairing up students in a 50-people class is certainly hard for the instructor to manage
the outcome quality of each pair, but dividing them into groups that contain more than five
people will easily nurture some free riders who give minor or no contribution to the learning or
collaboration process. I agree that employing the IRF guidelines could, to a certain degree, allow
students to initiate questions, provide responses, and follow up the responses freely among
themselves in order to reduce the instructors heavy workload in the situation mentioned above.
However, if the instructor fail to give enough feedback or correction in the student-student
interactions due to the difficulty to manage a large classroom, students might internalize the
mistakes as their target language structures without knowing they are wrong (because of their
limited language skills) until the mistakes are pointed out (take the pronunciation of gynecologist
for example).
Also, low WTC is quite ubiquitous among Asian students due to their cultural
backgrounds that tend to shape them into introvert personality and the strict social hierarchy
requires them to refrain from expressing opinions. The influencing factors of low WTC are more
than just a lack of self-confidencewhen they fell they are being criticized by the listener
(Teachers Handbook, Page 256). That is to say, it could be very difficult to conduct
interpersonal communication in an oversized classroom that consists fifty introvert learners
(which is possible in real-world even it sounds ridiculous).