Teaching by Principles Chapter 12: Sustaining
Interaction Through Group Work
Advantages of Group Work
-Group
work is a generic term covering a multiplicity of techniques in which two or
more students are assigned a task that involves collaboration and
self-initiated language.
1.Group work generates interactive language
-Help
to solve the problem of classes that are too large to offer many opportunities
to speak.
-Small
groups provide opportunities for student initiation, for face-to-face give and
take, for practice in negotiation of meaning, for extended conversational
exchanges, and for student adoption of roles that would otherwise be
impossible.
2.
Group work offers an embracing affective
climate
-Provide
students with the security of a smaller group.
-The
small group becomes a community of learners cooperating with each other in
pursuit of common goals.
-With
Maslow’s “security/safety” level satisfied through the cohesiveness of the
small group, learners are thus freed to pursue higher objective in their quest
for success, which in turn increase the student’s motivation.
3.
Group work promotes learner responsibility
and autonomy.
-Group
work places responsibility for action and progress upon each of the members of
the group somewhat equally.
4.
Group work is a step toward
individualizing instruction.
-Small
groups can help students with varying abilities to accomplish separate goals.
-The
teacher can recognize and capitalize upon other individual differences (age,
cultural heritage, field of study, cognitive style) by careful selection of
small groups and by administering different tasks to different groups.
Excuses for avoiding group work
1.
The teacher is no longer in control of
the class.
-With
careful attention to guidelines for implementation of group work,
administrative or managerial dilemmas should be avoidable.
2.
Students will use their native language.
-Impress
upon your students the importance of practice
in the second language for eventual success.
-Try
to home in on their intrinsic
motivation to learn.
-Demonstrate
how enjoyable the various small-group
tasks and games and activities are.
-Inform
students of the security offered by the smaller groups.
-Remind
students that research has shown that people do better on tests if they dive
into the language itself rather than just study test items.
3.
Students’ errors will be reinforced in
small groups.
-Levels
of accuracy maintained in unsupervised groups are as high as those in
teacher-monitored whole-class work.
-Teachers’
overt attempts to correct speech errors in the classroom have a negligible
effect on students’ subsequent performance.
-Errors
are a “necessary” manifestation of interlanguage development.
-Well-managed
group work can encourage spontaneous peer feedback on errors within the small
group itself.
4.
Teachers cannot monitor all groups at
once.
-The
effective teacher will circulate among groups, listen to students, and offer
suggestions and criticisms, though it is simply not necessary to be a party to
all linguistic intercourse in the classroom.
5.
Some learners prefer to work alone.
-Language
is for communicating with people, and the more they engage in such face-to-face
communication, the more their overall communicative competence will improve.
-Some
problems rooted in learning style differences can be solved by careful planning
and management.
Implementing Group Work in Your
Classroom
Selecting Appropriate Group
Techniques
-Pair work is more appropriate than
group work for tasks that are (a) short, (b) linguistically simple, and (c)
quite controlled in terms of the structure of the task.
-Pair
activities
˙Practicing dialogues with a
partner
˙Simple question-and-answer
exercises
˙Performing certain meaningful
substitution “drills”
˙Quick (one minute or less)
brainstorming activities
˙Checking written work with each
other
˙Preparation for merging with a
larger group
˙Any brief activity for which the
logistics of assigning groups, moving furniture, and getting students into the
groups is too distracting.
-Pair
work enables you to engage students in interactive (or quasi-interactive)
communication for a short period of time with
a minimum of logistical problems.
-Lectures,
drills, dictations, certain listening tasks, silent reading are not suitable
for small-group work.
-Group tasks
˙Games: Twenty Questions
˙Role-play
*Giving a role to one or more members of a
group
*Assigning an objective or purpose that
participants must accomplish
˙Simulations
*involves a more complex structure and often
larger groups (of 6 to 20) where the
entire group is
working through an imaginary situation as a social unit, the object
of which is to solve
some specific problem
˙Drama
*More formalized form of role-play or
simulation, with a pre-planned story line
and script.
* “Skit”: short dramatization of some event
˙Projects
*hands-on activities
˙Interview
˙Brainstorming
*Initiate some sort of thinking process
*Involves students in a rapid-fire,
free-association listing of concepts or ideas or
facts or feelings relevant to
some topic or context.
˙Information gap
*The primary attention us to information and
not to language forms.
*The necessity of communicative interaction
in order to reach the objective
˙Jigsaw
* Special form of information gap in which
each member of a group is given some
specific information and the goal
is to pool all information to achieve some
objective.
*“Strip story”:
reconstruction of a story
˙Problem solving and decision
making
*Problem solving: group’s solution to a
specified problem
*Decision making: one kind of problem
solving where the ultimate goal is for
students to make a decision
˙Opinion exchange
Planning Group Work
1.
Introduce the technique
-
The introduction almost always should include a statement of the ultimate
purpose so that students can apply all other directions to that objective.
2.
Justify the use of small groups for the
technique
-
Tell students explicitly why the small group is important for accomplishing the
task.
-
Remind students that they will get an opportunity to practice certain language
forms or class, now is their chance to do so in the security of a small group.
3.
Model the technique
-For
a new and potentially complex task, modeling might be necessary by being
explicit in making sure students know what they are supposed to do.
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