According to the first principle of interactive language teaching, who is…

Concept: Interactive language teaching starts from the premise that a language is mastered through use, not received as transmitted information. Its first principle, formulated by Wilga M. Rivers, holds that the student is the language learner: instruction can arrange the conditions, the opportunities and the feedback, but the internal work of forming, testing and revising hypotheses about the language has to be done by the person acquiring it.

Application: The stem asks where primary responsibility for language learning lies under that principle. Everything a course supplies - printed texts, a syllabus, lesson design, classroom talk - is input. The person who converts that input into a working command of the language by listening, speaking, reading, writing and self-correcting is the student, so primary responsibility rests with the student, and the teacher's role becomes that of an organiser and facilitator of interaction.

Contrast the four roles by what each actually does:

• The textbook author supplies graded passages and exercises - prepared input that is fixed before any particular learner meets it.

• The curriculum designer fixes the aims, scope and sequence of the course - a condition of learning rather than the act of learning.

• The teacher plans tasks, models the target language and gives feedback - an indispensable facilitator, but one who cannot do a learner's practice for them.

• The student engages in the interaction, takes the risks and does the practice through which the language is internalised, which is why Rivers places primary responsibility here.

Cross-check: Rivers states the principle as "the student is the language learner", with the corollary that where the student's own effort is not engaged, no learning takes place. This is exactly the point on which an interactive approach differs from a transmission model, in which the teacher would be treated as primarily responsible.