GROUP WORK

Group-based leaming is widely used in all forms of teaching and significantly changes the interactional dynamics of the classroom. In language classes it can help promote self-esteem, it increases student talking time, and it can also increase student motivation by providing a risk-free environment for language practice. However, setting up group activities põses a number of challenges. These indude:

• Time: The logistics of putting students into groups can be time consuming. • Cliques: Students often seat themselves in cliques by age, language group,

friendship, and so on.

• Limited language proficiency: Low-level students may have difficulty following instructions and be intimidated if working in a group with stronger students, leading them to remain silent.

• Control: Some teachers may feel that they are no longer in control of the class.

Successful implementation of group work involves the following considerations:

• Group size: Groups of four are best for ease of classroom management, espe- cially for teacher leamers.

• Groupformation: You or your cooperating teacher should select group members initially to achieve more of a heterogeneous mix that promotes peer tutoring and keeps the members focused on the task at hand.

• Mixedproficiency levels: One way is to mix the groups with leamers of different proficiency levels, as they can help each other with different tasks. Higher- proficiency students can be given more challenging tasks, such as acting as the group reporter or by taking notes about the group’s discussion,

• Noise levels: One student in each group can be appointed as a noise monitor to keep the noise at acceptable levels.

Creating an Effective Classroom Learning Environment | | |

• Nonparticipants: Students who are unfamiliar with group work may not value group-based learning work. In this case gende persuasion may be needed. • Unequal completion times: Have a back-up plan (e.g., an additional task

to complete) to limit the amount of disruption from groups who may finish early.

• Monitoring group performance: Silver (2008) suggests that teachers:

O Pause regularly to visually survey the class as a whole, each group, and individual students.

O Keep visits to each group short so you can continuously observe all in class. O Give students feedback to note when they are on track as well as off track. O When students seem to be going in the wrong direction, look and listen to

see what they are doing before jumping in.

O When you do intervene, comments should be intended to guide students back to the point at which they could do the work themselves.

In the following comments, student teachers describe decisions they made concerning grouping:

On Thursday I had a vocabulary lesson, partly because it was scheduled in the scheme o f work, but also because I believed it would be beneficial fo r the students to be exposed to the use o f the thesaurus and leam that there are many more words they can leam to use to replace the simple vocabulary that they tend to use every time they write, The lesson 's objective was fo r students to be able to distinguish emotive words from their supposed ‘‘neutral” counterparts, fo r example, consume yo u rfoo d as opposed to w olf down your food. Students also had to demonstrate the ability to construct sentences with the emotive words they found on the online thesaurus. I broke the students up into groups o f fa u r and each group member had a specific roie to play in the allotted time fo r this activity. I gave each group a thesaurus and the worksheet and let them at it. The groups had greatfun and found it easier to teil apart that ‘'w o lf is definitely more emotive compared to “consume” when they saw the word ‘'wolf* listed on the thesaurus. So not only did the students appear more interested and engaged, they also asked several questions which proved that their attention was caught and their genuine interest to leam about the subject was present. After the lesson my cooperating teacher noted that Iprobably should have plannedfor time to go through at least some o f the sentences to see that they are really getting the concept right and are able to do sentence construction with the words they pick up. However, she noted that they have definitely learned how to use a thesaurus and believed that this would come in usefulfor them in herfuture classes.

Zhez Zu, Singapore

Another lesson that I conducted this week was one that sought to help students generate more extended similes in their writing. 1 had suspected that, although most students knew what a simile was, most did not venture beyond the usualfixed “dull as dishwater” kind o f similes. At the beginning o f the lesson, I sought to establish what students knew about similes. And I was proven right. In order to stimulate students to generate their own interesting similes, I first distributed a worksheet that had unconventional similes, but used in a somewhat awkward manner The students were required to work in pairs to replace the awkward similes with their own. In the second part o f the lesson in order to engage the students, I took the boid step o f proclaiming that day “Insult Student Teacher Day, ” a day where students could insult me all they wanted, subject to certain guidelines to ensure