Using mini whiteboards to promote classroom interaction in university English as a foreign language course: A review of the literature

Instructors of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at the tertiary level routinely confront a cluster of interrelated challenges: unequal patterns of student participation, foreign-language anxiety, heterogeneous proficiency levels, and few reliable means of gauging the comprehension of an entire class at once. Under conventional teacher-fronted questioning, classroom talk tends to be monopolized by a small number of confident or high-proficiency students, while the majority of learners remain silent; the answers a teacher elicits may therefore misrepresent the learning state of the class as a whole. Mini whiteboards—small, erasable boards on which individual students or small groups write and simultaneously display responses—constitute a low-technology form of classroom response system. Drawing on scholarship in formative assessment, student response systems, active learning, classroom interaction, and foreign-language pedagogy, this review appraises the potential of mini whiteboards in university EFL instruction. The available evidence suggests that these tools may widen participation, render language learning visible, supply teachers with immediate evidence of comprehension, and attenuate some of the psychological risks that accompany public oral performance in a foreign language. They also appear capable of supporting vocabulary retrieval, grammar practice, reading comprehension, speaking preparation, and peer interaction. Direct empirical research conducted in university EFL settings, however, remains scarce. Further investigation is required to establish whether mini whiteboards yield measurable gains in English achievement, interactional quality, willingness to communicate, and long-term retention among tertiary EFL learners.