Interaction Processes in Group Work

Abstract

0 Recent psycholinguistic research has stressed the benefits learners can draw from conversing with one another in the language classroom (Long 1983, Porter 1983, Varonis and Gass 1983, Doughty and Pica 1984, Long and Porter 1985). However, the social reality of the classroom can make pair and small-group work difficult; the potential benefits of such activities are often mitigated by the perceptions, experiences,and expectations of the participants. Learners in peer conversations may feel at the mercy of other, more proficient participants. Less skillful learners may feel unable to control and manage the topic of the conversation; however, they may perceive their major source of trouble to be a linguistic deficiency and may not be aware of their problems with the interactive structure of the discourse (Kramsch 1981). In ESL classes, cultural differences in discourse management can lead to tensions and misunderstandings that reinforce cultural stereotypes and impede communication (Tannen 1979, Gumperz 1982). Finally, learners' expectations of their roles and tasks in classrooms can also counteract the potential benefits of group work. From a social-theoretical viewpoint, language learning in peer groups can be considered as the construction of a social reality in which discourse roles and tasks are not fixed in advance, but have to be determined by the participants. For example, group work requires students to fulfill group-task functions and group-maintenance functions that are traditionally the responsibility of the teacher in frontally taught classes (Schein 1969). If many of the difficulties encountered by learners are interactional in nature, explicit attention to interaction processes should be the first step in learning to construct discourse. The pilot study described in this report was conducted to test the feasibility of metacommunicative learning in the classroom, using an empirical, interpretive approach (Bales 1950, Soeffner 1979). Three issues were addressed: 1) the extent to which learners are capable of evaluating their own and others' patterns of participation in group interaction, 2) their ability to discuss these in the target language, and 3) the possible benefits of metacommunicative evaluations.