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Task type and teacher's role: Two important factors in effective group learning

Zhang Yunfeng

For decades Chinese teachers have been quite used to the traditional way of teaching English, in which the teacher is regarded as the authority who dominates the whole class. He or she explains the text in a traditional grammar-translation format, trying to put everything into students' minds while paying little attention to their feelings and reactions. As a result, Chinese students may do well on the English tests that are concerned with reading skills, such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language and Graduate Record Exam. But in other tests that focus more on speaking skills - such as the Test of Spoken English, the International English Language Testing System, and the Business English Certificate - they are found to be much less proficient (Cao Ling, 1999). Meanwhile, many university graduates, who have already studied English for more than 10 years, have to attend special speaking, listening, and writing courses to improve their ability to use the language. These factors have caught the attention of those involved with English teaching in China, as they have begun to realize the weak points of the traditional way of language teaching. Nowadays, many linguists and English teachers in China are turning to the communicative approach. Articles promoting a reform of language teaching have appeared in various journals, and some textbooks based on a more communicative syllabus have been written. The student-centered approach, which aims at improving learners' communicative competence, has been adopted by some language teachers. Group work, one of the most important class activities for developing students' communicative ability, is gradually being adopted for use in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms.

Group work boasts a number of advantages, as Gower (1987) has noted: It stimulates the learners' experience of various types of interaction, and helps to generate a more relaxed and cooperative classroom atmosphere. Students are more likely to feel free of the pressure of being listened to by the teacher and so are more ready to speak. In practice, however, there are some problems with group work. In my class I find that it is somewhat difficult to get everybody involved actively in the group work, and the use of the mother tongue is very common. In order to see how task types and teacher's roles affect students' performance in group work, I designed three experiments to try to answer the following two questions:

1.  Which task type, optional information exchange or required information exchange, is more effective?

An optional information-exchange (OIR) task (also called a one-way task) is one in which one or several participants possess all the information and the others have to get this information. Required information exchange (RIE) (also called a two-way task) is defined as a task that requires the exchange of information among all participants, each of whom possesses some piece of information not known by, but needed by, all other participants to solve the problem (Long & Porter, 1985).

2. To what extent do teachers' skills in organizing group work affect students' performance?

The intention of this article is to give some suggestions obtained through the experiments to make group work participation more balanced and to reduce the use of the mother tongue. Although mine is an EFL class, the outcome of my research may be useful for any teacher practicing group work.

Experiments in group work practice

The subjects in the present study were 30 first-year non - English-major students in Xi'an Institute of Posts and Telecommunications. Eight of the students were female, 22 were male. The English textbook we used - New College English (Ying Huilan, 2000) - was written under the guidance of the student-centered subject teaching model. Although the students had studied English for six years in secondary school, they had only learned vocabulary and grammar and had had little chance to speak. The students were divided into seven groups of four at random (the two extra students worked in a dyad). Three tasks were chosen from New College English for the study. All recordings of data were made during the three scheduled lessons. On each of the data-gathering occasions the students were asked to do one task, which was presented as part of the normal class routine.

The tasks were as follows:

Task 1: Describing the pictures

There were four pictures printed in the textbook. Each member of the group was asked to describe one of the four pictures that the other students could not see. The four pictures together made a well-organized story, but the story could be comprehensible only if each description was clear. The students did this task at the same time and in the same classroom. Task 1 could be done only if the students shared information. This was a required information-exchange task.

Task 2: Case study

The students were asked to work in groups to respond to the following case: You are young parents. You have a beautiful 8-year-old daughter. Like all parents you want your child to be happy and healthy. You want to give her all the love and support you can. What are the most important things you would do to ensure her physical, intellectual, and emotional health? Different groups did Task 2 simultaneously. Obviously, there was no obligation to exchange information in this task. It was an optional information-exchange task.

Task 3: Free discussion

After listening to an interview about people's attitude toward 10 professions, the students were asked to discuss the following questions in groups:

1. What is your impression of these professions?
2. Do you have any prejudices against these professions? If so, what are your prejudices?
3. What factors will influence you in choosing a job?

There was no obligation to exchange information in this task. It was also an optional information-exchange task. The first two groups did this task with only the task directions and little help from the teacher. For the second two groups, the teacher intervened, gave clear instructions, and appointed group leaders during the process of discussion.

The measure used in this study is the AS-unit - the Analysis of Speech Unit. It is described by Foster, Tonkyn, and Wigglesworth (2000) like this: An AS-unit is a single speaker's utterance consisting of an independent clause, or sub-clausal unit, or together with any subordinate clause(s) associated with either. A sub-clausal unit refers to one or more phrases that have meaning from the context of the discourse or situation. For example, "yes," "no," "thank you," "I understand," and "oh, poor man" are counted as AS-units.

Results and analysis of the first two experiments

The first two tasks were done within four minutes each. Three groups were chosen, at random, to be recorded. The results are shown in the tables.

From Table 1 we see that the three groups produced the same result: The required information-exchange task resulted in more AS-units than the optional information-exchange task.

Table 1. Number of AS-units produced by Groups A, B, and C

Table 2 shows that in Task 1 the individuals in each group shared the interaction fairly. There was no big gap among them in language production. In Task 2, however, the distribution of language production is not balanced. It is obviously much more difficult for a student to remain silent in a required information-exchange task. Even S₆ in Group B, who said nothing in the optional information-exchange task, produced a quarter of the AS-units in the required information-exchange task.

Table 2. Number of AS-units produced by each student in Groups A, B, and C

From the numbers of language-production AS-units by each group and by the individuals in each group, we may come to some conclusions: First, the RIE task brings more AS-units than the OIE task; second, the RIE task results in more balanced language production than the OIE task.

Results and analysis of the third experiment

There was no restricted time limit for Task 3. The students were asked to inform the teacher when they finished the discussion. Groups D and E and Groups F and G did the task separately. The teacher gave the first two groups very simple instructions, read aloud the three questions, asked the students to discuss them, and stood by when the discussion was under way. For the last two groups, the teacher asked the students to brainstorm the words that came into their minds when they were told what they were going to discuss. A group leader was appointed to host the discussion, making sure that everybody in the group spoke and that English was the only language used. Once the discussion was under way, the teacher kept her distance, at first. After approximately half of the discussion time had elapsed, she went around the classroom, listening to discussions, giving suggestions, and encouraging the less able or shyer students to speak. The results are shown in Table 3 and Table 4.

Table 3. Number of AS-units produced by groups D, E, F and G

Table 4. Number of AS-units produced by each student in groups D, E, F and G

The results of language production indicate that the teacher's skills in organizing group work are of vital importance. Effective instruction will make students speak more and create a more balanced performance.

Conversational modification (including comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification requests) plays an important role in making input comprehensible, and thereby promotes second-language acquisition. A structured interview was carried out during break time among the students in the study about the effects of the teacher's presence when discussion is underway. Among 30 students, 14 said the absence or presence of the teacher would not affect their conversation, while 16 students said the teacher's absence would make them feel free to talk and the teacher's presence would make them feel embarrassed. Nobody said the teacher's presence would make him or her produce more modifications, so I assumed that the presence or absence of the teacher would not influence the amount of modified interaction in group work. Table 5 presents each student's modification in Task 3.

Table 5. Number of modifications produced by each student in task 3

From Table 5 we notice that as far as modification was concerned, there was a great difference among the individual students. The most notable feature is that the modification numbers for Groups D and E were 5 zeros. It seems that the students in these two groups were speaking on their own when doing this task, not talking with one another. When asked why there was little modified interaction, the students said that they felt embarrassed to indicate their lack of comprehension in front of their teacher, so they were reluctant to ask their interlocutors even when they did not understand others' words. This suggests that once the group discussion is under way, it is advisable for the teacher to keep his or her distance for a while, as some students may feel inhibited in front of the teacher.

From these three experiments, we can observe some problems with group work. First, student participation in group work is unbalanced. Second, there are few modified interactions among the students. The main reasons are as follows: First, Chinese students are often shy. They are used to "listening carefully," as it is a Chinese tradition to listen more and speak less (we have been taught that's why we have two ears and only one mouth). Second, some students think that if they ask questions it shows that their English is not as good as that of their classmates.

They would, thus, rather keep silent than "lose face," especially in front of their teacher. Third, a few students regard "interrupting the conversation by asking questions" as an impolite behavior.

Suggestions obtained through the experiments

I am going to offer some suggestions on both group work design of EFL textbooks and group work organization by the teacher.

Suggestions on group work design of EFL textbooks

Two popular EFL textbooks in China, Book I of College English (Revised Edition) (Dong Yafen, 1997) and New College English (Ying Huilan, 2000), are taken as examples. Results from rating the activities in the two popular EFL textbooks are given in Table 6.

Table 6. Number of activities in the two textbooks

Table 6 shows that in New College English there are only 20 required information-exchange tasks among 123 group activities. This amounts to only 16% of the total group activities. Although the percentage of optional information-exchange tasks in College English (23%) is higher than that in New College English, in terms of absolute number it is still low.

Here I suggest that the structure of group work in the teaching materials be changed. The number of RIE tasks can be increased so as to make the students, especially weaker students, speak more, because only when each member of the group contributes can the task be accomplished. These kinds of activities include role-play (each student plays a role), picture describing (each has a picture to describe to form a story), and asking questions.

On the other hand, a few group activities appear to have been created merely by adding the words "in groups" in to the descriptions of what were formerly individual tasks. For example, in New College English reading-centered activities, there are group work directions like this: "Work in groups for the text structure and complete the outline with what you get from the passage." When doing this kind of exercise, students usually ignore the instructions and would rather do it alone. This kind of group work needs clearer direction to encourage students to cooperate with one another. Some of the tasks can be changed into individual work; for most, more specific instruction and more guidance should be given to encourage students to interact effectively.

The English textbooks mentioned here are only examples. I often hear complaints from my colleagues that their Chinese textbooks, their history textbooks, and so on have the same problems: There are not enough group activities, and the instructions for group work are not clear. "Do it in groups" does not necessarily make something into group work. Unfortunately, this is very common and appears in all kinds of textbooks.

Suggestions on group work organization

From these experiments we see that although group work is a student-centered activity, a teacher plays a very important role in it. The teacher's competence with regard to group work affects students' performance greatly

The results of the third experiment suggest that the teacher's clear instructions will bring more language production and more modified interaction. At the same time, the teacher's absence will result in more modified interaction, too. The following are some suggestions for teachers in group work organization.

1. Clear instruction of the task

Clear instruction is of great importance to the success of group work. Before group work begins, the teacher's task is to make all the students know the requirements of the task and help them get ready for it. Some warm-up exercises may be useful. For example, the teacher can give students hints to help them think over the topic from different points of view; she or he can provide the students, or ask them to brainstorm, some relevant words, phrases, and sentence patterns; or the teacher can read one or two short passages on related topics so as to help them generate their own ideas.

2. Specification of each student's role

If the group work is about discussion, each group can have a group leader, a secretary, and a reporter (students can interchange the roles). The group leader hosts the discussion and works as a monitor, making sure that everybody in the group speaks and that English is the only language used during the activity. The secretary takes notes of what each person has said and, on the basis of these notes, develops an outline (alone or with the reporter). The reporter is responsible for the presentation to the whole class later on. The other members contribute their ideas to the group. In this way, every member of the group has some responsibility, and each student has a specific role. So, no matter at what level the students are, they have to speak and take an active part in group work.

Although none of the students spoke Chinese during the experimental group work because they knew they were being recorded, the use of the mother tongue remained a problem. The group leader's role as monitor is very important in reducing or eliminating the use of the mother tongue, no matter whether the group activity is discussion, role-playing, storytelling, or other forms of group work.

3. Teacher's role when group work is under way

According to Harmer (1997) the teacher can act as controller, assessor, organizer, prompter, participant, resource, tutor, and/or investigator in the group work. Some useful don'ts for the teacher's role in group work were given by Brown (1991): Do not sit at your desk and grade papers, do not leave the room and take a break, do not spend an undue amount of time with one group at the expense of others, do not correct students' errors unless asked to do so, and do not assume a dominating or disruptive role while monitoring groups. Bligh, Ebrahim, Jacques, and Warrenpiper (1975) suggested the following prohibitions: Don't correct or reject the first contributions - even if they are wildly wrong; don't state an opinion rigidly - as this may inhibit students; and don't answer questions that could be answered by other members of the class.

From the results of the experiments, I suggest two more don'ts: Do not go around the classroom and do not stay with the students at the beginning of the group work. Once the group work is under way, it is advisable for the teacher to keep his or her distance for a while, as some students may feel inhibited in front of the teacher. But during the last few minutes of the group work, it may be a good idea for the teacher to circulate to see how things are going with each group, give suggestions and encouragement, and answer questions.

Conclusion

This article investigates the effects of two group work task types and explores the teacher's role in a real classroom setting. Although the study has been carried out in the Chinese context, I think the suggestions I put forward are of some value in other cultural settings and other subject areas. No matter what the cultural and educational environment, there are students who fail to participate in group work efficiently. They may be shy, may be poor at the subject, or may come from a different cultural setting. If the teacher chooses required information-exchange tasks and uses skills in organizing group work, these students will be "forced" to speak, the result will thus be effective group work.

Of course, this is simply a preliminary study about group work, and it has some limitations. Only 30 students participated in the study and the experiments were done within only three scheduled lessons, but I hope it will be helpful for EFL teaching in different cultural settings as well as for other subject areas.

References

Bligh, D.A., Ebrahim, G.J., Jacques, D., & Warrenpiper, D. (1975). Teaching students. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Teaching Services.

Brown, R. (1991). Group work, task difference, and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 12, 1-12.

Cao Ling. (1999). The balance of language input and output in EFL classes for Chinese students. Teaching English in China, 34, 9-14.

Dong Yafen. (1997). College English (Revised Edition). Shanghai: Foreign Language Education Press.

Foster, P., Tonkyn, N., & Wigglesworth, G. (2000). Measuring spoken language: A unit for all reasons. Applied Linguistics, 21, 354-375.

Gower, R. (1987). Speaking. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Harmer, J. (1997). The practice of English language teaching. London: Longman.

Long, M., & Porter, P. (1985). Group work, interlanguage talk and second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 19, 207-228.

Ying Huilan. (2000). New college English. Peking: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Zhang Yunfeng teaches English at Xi an Institute of Posts and Telecommunications in Xi'an, People's Republic of China.

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