Students’ preferences for seating arrangements and their engagement in cooperative learning activities in college English blended learning classrooms in higher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous research has documented that seating arrangements have great impact on student's active engagement within classrooms. However, insufficient attention has been given to students’ preferences for classroom seating arrangements and their engagement in college English language blended learning classrooms in higher education. Employing questionnaire surveys and a case study method with a sample of 94 first-year college students, the present research examined how students’ preferences for seating arrangements affected their engagement in cooperative learning (CL) activities in English as a foreign language (EFL) blended learning classrooms in higher education. The analysis through a two-way repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) indicated that a semicircular seating arrangement was better for integrating students into the CL activities than a rows-and-columns seating arrangement in terms of communication affordance, concentration maintenance, and classroom environment. An analysis with a Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicated that students’ preference for the former seating type remained the same; that is, they preferred semicircular seating both before and after they had experienced both kinds of seating types because it promoted a better classroom experience. Implications for how to utilize seating arrangements to enhance student engagement in EFL blended learning classrooms in higher education are discussed.