English conversation course and group work

A course in English conversation for intermediate level learners was started today. The number of students who had enrolled for the course was 17. However, there were 14 students present for the first class today. These kinds of study programs are organized by the Department of Languages and Linguistics, Prince of Songkla University, Hatyai Campus, for adult learners. The students of this course are of various age levels and educational backgrounds.

Of the 14 students who were present today, there were three police officers, one pharmacist, two lecturers working at the faculty of Nursing, PSU, one house wife, one school student, one accountant, one doctoral student from the faculty of Agro-industry, PSU, one dietician working at Songklanagarind Hospital, one undergraduate student from another university, one student handling her own business. As is often the case with low participation of males in education, there were only 4 male students. Most participants could communicate in the target language to a certain degree in that they could introduce themselves and introduce their friends.

Today I assigned them with the group activity given below:

 Would you like to go shopping?

Topics:      Dresses, shoes, food items, department stores, and bargain sale

Functions: Greeting people and responding to greetings, asking for help, offering

                   help, accepting an offer, giving and responding to invitations, asking

                   prices for consumer goods, asking for discounts, making appointments,

                   accepting and rejecting invitations, inquiring about movies, and rejecting

                   offers politely

Structure: Simple present, requests with can/may/could, offers with will/would you

                  like? Wh-questions/ yes-no questions, conditionals -if you buy two, you
                  will get one free

When we do shopping, we buy various items such as food, vegetables, fruit, dresses, electronics and electrical appliances

The language you may need

I want to buy a shirt /I’m looking for a shirt

How much is this blouse?

No thanks

Anything else?

Do you have other colors?

This is an imported one

Is this locally made?

Can you give me a discount?

Sorry, we don’t have it at the moment.

It is out of stock.

Do you have a home delivery service?

Roles: A: you    B: your friend       C: a salesperson      D: a ticketing clerk at a cinema  

Role-play

A: Suppose today is Sunday and you are free so you want to go shopping with one of

     your friends in a department store.
     First, call your friend and ask if he/she is free today and tell that you want to buy a

     pair of shoes. So you would like to go with him/her. If he/she accepts your

    invitation, make an appointment to meet him/her at a designated place and time.

    Example: Hello Mai, are you free today? I want to go shopping with you.

    Accepts the invitation: Yes, definitely, I’d love to.

    Rejects invitation: Oh, sorry, Mew. I’m busy cleaning my room right now. How

    about later?

    Where would you like to go shopping?

B: You see your friend waiting for you at the designated place. Greet him/her and

     thank him/her for coming. Then go for shopping at the place you have chosen

C: You are a salesman at a shoe shop. Greet the customers and ask if you could help

     them. Attend to their requirement and finish the transaction.

     Now you have bought the shoes and come out of the shop. Your friend suggests

     seeing a movie at the theatre housed in the same shopping center on the 6^th floor.

     Both of you go to the theatre and enquires about the film.

D: You are at the ticket counter and someone is enquiring about the film. Tell him/her

     that all the seats are full and if he/she likes the tickets can be issued for the next

     show.

A&B: You both don’t like to wait until the next show so turn down her request

     politely and leave the shopping center.

What I observed when learners were put into groups and made to interact with each other within their group is the group dynamics. When one wants to talk about the nature of effective teaching and learning, one has to agree with Earl Stevick’s statement which I quote below:

[In a language course] success depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analysis, and more on what goes on inside and between the people *(learners) in the classroom (Stevick, 1984, p. 4). *(bracketed word is mine).

What Stevick states become practically true if a teacher carefully observes his/her students working together in a group because group work provides learners with opportunities to negotiate meaning, expand their language resources, notice how language is used, and take part in meaningful interpersonal exchange. Given the importance of group dynamics in language classroom, L2 teachers are encouraged to introduce group activities in their teaching contexts where learners receive no opportunities to use the target language outside the classroom.

Cohen (1994, p. 1) defines group work as, “students working together in a group small enough so that everyone can participate on a task that has been clearly assigned”. Cohen (1994), furthermore, observes that learning of language and the improvement of oral communication in any language teaching context, in bilingual, or for students of any age who need to improve skills in oral communication, active practice is essential. Therefore, in order to provide students with opportunities to practice and use the target language, group work is an effective teaching technique because students in group work can communicate about their activity with  each other and this kind of communication involves a number of functions such as asking questions, explaining, making suggestions, criticizing, listening, agreeing, disagreeing, or making joint decisions.      

Long and Porter (1985) present five pedagogical arguments for the use of group work in second language learning such as 1. group work  increases  language practice opportunities, 2. group work improves the quality of student talk. 3. group work helps individualize instruction. 4. group work  promotes  a positive affective climate in the classroom. 5. group work increases student motivation. Since these arguments are relevant to the current study, I examine them in detail. Long and Porter (1985) argue that one of the main reasons for low achievement by many L2 learners is simply that  they do not have enough time to practice the new language. Therefore, they assert that even though group work cannot provide each learner with more time to practice entirely, group work can help each learner to receive a fair amount time for practice the new language compared to the time each learner is likely to receive in a teacher-led class.

In a teacher-led class, Flanders (1970) reports that each learner receives 30 seconds as the talk time per lesson in a class of 30 students in a 50-minute lesson. Concerning the second argument, Long and Porter point out that a teacher-led class can limit not only the quantity of talk students can engage in but also its quality because teacher-led lessons are mostly based on conventionalized variety of conversations. In other words, a teacher asks a series of known information or display questions from the students and they answer with one word or two. Long and Porter maintain that the kind of conversations described above which the teacher conducts with the learners may not improve the conversational skills students will need outside the class. To improve the quality of talk, they suggest that students should do group work in which they sit or stand facing each other and work together to accomplish a given activity.  This argument seemed true for my experimental students because face to face interaction with each other demanded a response or attentive behavior when they were working in groups consisting of four or five students.

The next argument which Long and Porter advanced addresses the potential of group work that can help individualize instruction. They say that in a given group of students, there are individual differences in language abilities. Therefore, students with low proficiency can benefit working with a different set of materials suited to their proficiency levels thereby avoiding the risk of boring other students who have high proficiency and need less time to complete a given activity.

The fourth argument proposed by Long and Porter concerns a positive affective climate. They agree that students who are shy or linguistically insecure, experience considerable stress when they learn a foreign language in a teacher-fronted classroom because the shy students feel that they must respond accurately and above all quickly to the teacher’s questions. In contrast to the atmosphere of teacher-fronted instruction, they argue that a small group of peers provides a relatively intimate setting and, usually, a more supportive environment in which shy students can develop their foreign language skills. In other words, small group interaction provides learners with an opportunity to enjoy freedom from the requirement for accuracy at all costs and entry into the richer and more intimate relationships with their group members. A condition of the type described in small group above promotes a positive affective climate which in turn allows for shy and linguistically insecure students to develop their aural-oral skills in a given target language.

In view of the last argument which suggests that group work motivates learners, Long and Porter admit that group work allows for a greater quantity and richer variety of language practice which is better adapted to individual needs and conducted in a more positive affective climate. Students are individually involved in lessons more often and at a more personal level. For all the reasons stated above, Long and Porter believe that group work motivates the classroom learner. In order to support the belief that group work motivates learners, they provide empirical evidence from several studies. Littlejohn (1983) found that small-groups in which learners studied independently  led to increased motivation to study Spanish among beginning students while another study  in 1982, Littlejohn reports that learners responding to a questionnaire reported that they felt less inhibited and freer to speak and make mistakes in the small group than in the teacher-led class. Similarly, in a study of children's attitudes to the study of French in an urban British comprehensive school Fitz-Gibbon and Reay (1982) found that three quarters of the pupils ranked their interest for French as a school subject.

In addition to the above pedagogical arguments, Long and Porter (1985) assert that there is a psychological rationale for group work in second language learning.  Referring to psychological rationale for group work, Long (1977) posits that group work increases the intellectual and emotional involvement of the individual pupil in learning a foreign language. He, furthermore, argue that learners with different personal characteristics such as intelligent, gifted, outgoing, communicative, shy, withdrawn, extroverted, and introverted can meet and mix, compensating for one another’s strong points and deficiencies as language learners. What Long (1977) emphasize concerning the psychological rationale for group work becomes a reality in my class. Because I notice that students of different personal traits as discussed above interact together displaying the degree to which they are behaviorally conditioned. For example, extroverted students are very active and want to present their role-plays first before the others while shy students wait until all the groups finish their presentations.

Emphasizing the research findings that support the quantity of practice stated above, Long and Porter (1985) illustrate that students receive significantly more individual language practice opportunities in group work than in lockstep lessons. They also receive significantly more practice opportunities in non-native/non-native speaker than in native/non-native speaker dyads (Porter, 1983), and more in two-way than in one-way tasks (Doughty & Pica, 1984). The view expressed by Long and Porter (1985), Pica and Doughty (1986) in terms of the practice opportunities which the students receive in group work can further be supported from the evidence of my class. I observe that when my students are engaged in group work, they share ideas, discuss certain issues to reach an agreement (depending on the task). Furthermore, I have observed that some members assist others who are not proficient in their groups and some groups seek assistance from other groups. In addition to the merits of group work as an effective classroom technique that can be used to help students improve their oral proficiency in the target language, research has shown that group work can facilitate error correction (Porter, 1983; Bruton & Samuda, 1980).

Watch this video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh2mzhRRgOY to get an idea of how students practise a given activity before presenting it to the class and watch the next video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouVDHNC2P2I where the intermediate learners do a role-playing activity on "Would you like to go shopping".