Teachers have for many years used pair work as a panacea for large classes
and the accompanying problem of individual speaking time. Long and Porter
(1985) outline some arguments for pair work, noting that it gives students
greater practice opportunities, and allows students to escape from traditional
teacher-fronted lessons where the teacher often asks questions to which
the answer is already known. It also individualises the lesson, as the student
is away from the public arena and is thus free to speak without inhibition
with classmates rather than practicing language for its own sake. Slightly
more complicated is the claim that pairwork involves negotiation of meaning
or communicative consensus which leads to grammatical learning: Arguing
that "attentiveness and involvement" are necessary for successful
communication Gass and Seliger (1991) maintain, "It is precisely active
involvement that is the facilitator of communication in that it charges
the input and allows it to penetrate deeply" (p. 219).
However, do our students share our enthusiasm for the pedagogical and
psychological raison d'etre for pair work, or do they see it in such terms
as the chance for the teacher to have a rest from doing the talking? Are
our students in Japan, often using pair work in monolingual dyads, equally
convinced of its value? Many have come through a rigorous university entrance
exam, preparation for which often entailed traditional, teacher-fronted
lessons, and so perhaps have not been socialised to pair work as a learning
tool. This paper aims to examine learner perceptions and attempts to explain
teacher and learner mismatches.
Background: The penguin in the tuxedo
In two English Conversation classes at different universities I assigned
the same pair work activities in the same week. Students each received a
hand out which I had prepared of symbols ranging from everyday traffic signs
to fairly obscure symbols found on packaging. The object of the task was
(in pairs) to use modals (such as may, might, could etc. ) and adverbs
(probably, perhaps, and maybe). The students were to ask and
answer, agree and disagree, concede opinions and explain interpretations
and generally to "negotiate meaning. "
Students in Class A attend a small, private university. There were only
twelve students, second-year or above, studying English as an elective subject.
Class B consisted of fifty-two freshmen at a national university studying
English as a compulsory subject. They were all education majors, many of
whom told me that they hoped to become English teachers.
Class A managed to fulfil the goals of the activity most satisfactorily.
I had to draw the exercise to a close, as the students were so engrossed
in attempting to communicate their ideas and to share opinions that the
exercise went over the allotted time. It created a humorous atmosphere and
the task obviously stretched their imagination. A symbol of a penguin wearing
a bow tie and tuxedo led to some interesting speculations. The students
were aware of, and sympathetic towards their partners, attempted to keep
conversations going and paraphrased when misunderstandings occurred.
However, in contrast, many students in Class B seemed to display a poor
motivation to learn. Using Good and Brophy's (1990, p. 47) definition, this
meant a tendency to find the task meaningless, which led to a low persistence
in on-task behaviour. In short, many students did not seem to want to put
their language skills to communicative use, consistently choosing the quickest
route to close the conversation, often without any negotiation. I did observe
students engrossed in conversations, but in their mother tongue, and not
about the task, while many were desultorily flicking through pages of their
textbook or looking out of the window. Perhaps most unfortunate of all,
some were studiously ignoring their partners, indicating that they probably
had not even attempted to start the task. Overall, they seemed to be waiting
for the "proper" lesson to resume. During the subsequent class
discussion I was asked for my interpretation of the penguin in a tuxedo.
Recalling the imaginative responses of Class A, I replied that I did not
know for sure but it could mean a public restroom, or a refrigerated area
or perhaps directions to a ballroom for social dancing. This was evidently
an unsatisfactory answer for some students, one of whom flung down his pen
in exasperation as if to say, "Now, what was the point of that exercise?"
Why is there a gap between teacher intention and learner interpretation?
Nunan (1990) writes that the effectiveness of a programme depends on
the expectations of the learners, and if their subjective needs and perceptions
related to the learning process are not taken into account, there can be
a "mismatch" of ideas. Kumaravadivelu (1991) in agreement notes
that "the narrower the gap between teacher intention and learner interpretation
of a given task, the greater are the chances of achieving desired learning
outcomes" (p. 98). Class B, therefore seemed to have misconceptions
and some possible explanations are summarised below:
Strategic Misconception
This refers to teacher and learner perceptions of the objectives of learning
tasks. Ellis (1988, p. 202) draws a distinction between a "content"
syllabus which states the target knowledge as a product, and a "procedural"
syllabus which describes the kind of behavior which the learner will have
to undertake in order to develop second language knowledge. In the "penguin
in a tuxedo" exercise, learning was seen as a cognitive task which
needs automaticity and integration of skills through meaningful opportunities
for students to demonstrate understanding of modals and adverbs. The aim
of the task was to generate discussion and negotiated conversation. All
too often the students used the simplest strategies to reach a conclusion
as quickly as possible, since they interpreted the accomplishment of the
task to be its successful completion, rather than sustained discussion.
Pedagogic Misconception
The students' observed confusion of process and final product led them
to perceive me as the ultimate supplier of the correct answer at the end
of the task. Therefore, the students felt that they did not have to try
very hard or persist in coming up with an answer during the exercise. This
led to the frustration I noted earlier of a student flinging down his pen
when I stated that I was unsure of a symbol's meaning. The students did
not have the satisfaction of a concrete answer in front of them.
Methodological Mismatch
Good and Brophy (1990, p. 409) note that task relevance is the learner's
perception of how instruction is related to their personal needs or goals.
Those instrumental needs are served when the content of the lesson matches
what the students themselves believe they need. Some students may prefer
traditional types of learning with a desire for accuracy and a clear sense
of progression. When students value error correction highly, the communicative
approach, with its game-like activities and pictures, may seem artificial
and be relatively unpopular.
Learning Style Mismatch
Oxford et al. (1992, p. 440) write that learning styles are " biologically
and developmentally imposed sets of characteristics that make some teaching
methods wonderful for some and terrible for others." Reid (1987), Hyland
(1994), and Ozeki (1995) conducted questionnaire surveys and concluded that
Japanese university students prefer visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and individual
learning to pair or group work. Many of the students' classroom orientation
influenced their behaviour particularly in terms of value placed on, and
attention given to learning tasks.
Student Mismatch
Some students in class B were ignoring their partners, displaying a lack
of "learner receptiveness" (Allright and Bailey, 1994, p.158),
whereby "able" students may feel "they have nothing to gain"
from interacting with "less efficient" students who in turn feel
demoralised by the perceived superior performance of their partner.
Motivational Mismatch
Berwick and Ross (1989) write that the pressure of university entrance
exams channels motivation to learn into proficiency with little communicative
value. This extrinsic motivation drops off when the student enters a university
and English is often seen as having little purpose.
"Mug and Jug" Theory
Arguably, previous learning experiences during high school with the near
synonymous grammar-translation approach with its overemphasis on language
rules have influenced the students. Even though the Monbusho seems to support
more communicative teaching (Ministry, 1997), teachers have complained that
approved textbooks are boring and lack authentic language and communicative
activities (Templin, 1997). High school education is based essentially on
the traditional "mug and jug" theory (Rogers, 1983, p. 136), in
which the teachers ask themselves, "How can I make the jug hold still
while I fill it from the jug with these facts that the curriculum planners
and I regard as valuable?" The freshman student may see the role of
the teacher to impart knowledge, and so the communicative classroom, where
feedback and correction play less of a role, may call for a cultural leap
and thus disconcert students.
|
| |||||
| Question 1 | |||||
| Strongly Agree | Agree | Undecided | Disagree | Strongly Disagree | |
| I like to learn by... | |||||
| Reading | 20 | 52 | 23 | 5 | 1 |
| Studing grammar | 8 | 39 | 21 | 28 | 4 |
| Talking with the teacher | 32 | 40 | 19 | 6 | 1 |
| Listening to the tapes | 20 | 42 | 28 | 8 | 3 |
| Repeating after the teacher | 18 | 37 | 34 | 11 | 1 |
| Pair work | 35 | 42 | 21 | 3 | 1 |
| Translating from Japanese | 7 | 32 | 43 | 15 | 4 |
| Question 2 | |||||
| Strongly Agree | Agree | Undecided | Disagree | Strongly Disgree | |
| Pair work is good because I can practice new words and grammer | 11 | 47 | 27 | 13 | 0 |
| Pair work is not good because I don't like talking in English with a Japanese person |
1 | 5 | 19 | 53 | 22 |
| Pair work is good because I can learn new words from my partner | 10 | 40 | 34 | 16 | 1 |
| Pair work is not good because my mistakes are not corrected | 4 | 22 | 26 | 33 | 16 |
| Pair work is good because I can choose the words I want to say | 29 | 46 | 24 | 8 | 1 |
| Pair work is not good because I like working alone | 0 | 4 | 8 | 45 | 43 |
| Pair work is good because I learn better by doing something | 19 | 61 | 17 | 3 | 19 |
| Question 3: In the pair work when you or your partner don't understand, what do you do? |
|||||
| never | Raely | Sometimes | Often | Always | |
| Give up | 12 | 34 | 43 | 11 | 1 |
| Try to find a different word | 4 | 14 | 29 | 42 | 11 |
| Speak in Japanese | 1 | 8 | 39 | 45 | 8 |
| Guess your partner's meaning | 0 | 10 | 37 | 40 | 12 |
| Start the coversation again | 2 | 22 | 36 | 32 | 8 |
| Guesture or mime | 11 | 24 | 29 | 29 | 8 |
| Translate from Japanese into English | 3 | 22 | 41 | 30 | 3 |
| Use a dictinary | 0 | 4 | 8 | 45 | 43 |
| Just wait. Maybe yur partner will help | 8 | 25 | 40 | 24 | 4 |
| Question 4: In pair work, how often do you...? | |||||
| never | Rarely | sometimes | often | always | |
| Ignore your partner | 71 | 13 | 14 | 2 | 0 |
| Talk about something else in Japanese | 9 | 35 | 34 | 22 | 1 |
| Sleep | 91 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Read the next few pages of your textbook | 39 | 35 | 17 | 8 | 1 |
| Do other homework | 81 | 13 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Look at your dairy | 68 | 15 | 14 | 2 | 1 |
| Look out of the window | 44 | 37 | 14 | 5 | 0 |
| Sit quietly and do nothing | 52 | 23 | 19 | 5 | 0 |
| About the students | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | mean |
| Did they like the course | 0 | 1 | 7 | 10 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Enthusiam in studying | 0 | 3 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 3.8 |
| Did they preview the material | 2 | 5 | 8 | 6 | 2 | 3.4 |
| Did they understand content | 0 | 4 | 7 | 9 | 3 | 3.7 |
| Were they satified | 0 | 2 | 4 | 7 | 10 | 3.7 |
The Rationale for the Questionnaire
To get some tentative data about these questions, I decided to give a
questionnaire based on attitudes towards pair work to a third group of students,
national university freshmen at the end of their first semester. Would the
students, as Hyland (1994) observed, be more accepting of pair work over
a period of time, or would the findings back up the observations of Class
B that pair work is not always seen as a valid learning instrument?
Recent interest in learner-centered education implies that all who participate
in learning have a legitimate interest in its quality and progress. Students
are often the most logical evaluators of the quality and effectiveness of
course elements. The Monbusho (1997) also recognises that improvements in
both lesson content and teaching method rely on self-monitoring by teachers
and student evaluatiion of the extent to which classes are meeting their
expectations.
Results
There were 161 replies, which were converted to percentages. Due to rounding,
the figures do not always total100%.
After 15 weeks the students appear to have become acclimatised, to a
degree, to the teaching methods of foreign teachers. There is a spread of
learning styles with only translation being seen as less than beneficial.
It is clear that the preferred learning instrument is talking to the teacher,
with pair work also highly favoured. In the absence of direct contact with
the teacher, pair work is seen as the next best option.
This seemingly contradicts Reid's (1987) results that Japanese students
had a dislike of group work, as 80% stated that they learned better by doing
something, with 88% disagreeing that working alone is good. However, over
40% doubt whether pair work provides sufficient practice, and 48% saying
that they doubt whether they could learn new words from their partner, indicating
that they perhaps undervalue, or are unaware of, the benefits of negotiating
meaning. Perhaps students need to be shown the cognitive benefits of negotiation,
which would encourage greater on-task persistence.
The results here can be interpreted positively with only a small percentage
of students claiming that they never use strategies when there are misunderstandings
in pair work. However a majority of students admitted they at least sometimes
gave up and over 90% spoke in Japanese. In other words, most learners at
some point can not adjust their speaking to make the speech production comprehensible
to the listener and are thus reducing chances of language acquisition. Varonis
and Gass (1985) note that learners will not acquire language by being talked
at, they have to be actively involved in negotiating both the quality and
the quantity. Comprehensibility is crucial in determining whether spoken
language works as input.
Letting the students into the picture
Looking back, Class A fulfilled the task-goals and was highly motivated.
As eight of the 12 had undertaken a homestay, they perceived the similarities
between pair work and "real world" dialogues, while Class B was
unaware of the objectives at either the curriculum or individual lesson
levels. Although they have preconceptions about what form a learning experience
should take, they may be ambivalent about expressing them, in the belief
that it is the teacher's job to teach. If the teacher adopts a less authoritarian
role, the students may feel that the teacher is not doing the job properly.
Since students often translated or talked about something else during pair-work,
they may well have felt that the purpose of the activity was relaxation
rather than promotion of language acquisition. Therefore it should be no
surprise for learners to let L2 communicative opportunities pass if it is
more convenient to use Japanese. Yet by doing so, they are missing opportunities
to create modified output.
In addressing a range of learning styles which are modified by the teacher
when explaining the value of "communicative" activities, Tarone
and Yule (1989, p. 9) talk of ways in which both teacher and student can
fulfill their expectations of what counts in the learning experience: "fight
'em, join 'em, or channel 'em," with the last being perhaps the most
effective, Brown (1994, p. 176) refers to "setting the climate":
impressing on the students the necessity of pair-work practice for future
success. When students feel that the directions for a task are not clear,
or are unsure of the purpose, "you are inviting students to take short
cuts via the native language." Therefore the teacher needs to encourage
knowledge of the most frequently used rubrics and using them in an initial
learning exercise or game should ensure future understanding. Brown goes
on to say that appealing to motivational factors is necessary for the learners
to see the real uses of English in their own lives. Stevick (1980) has noted
that successful communication is dependent on attentiveness and involvement
in the discourse by all the participants, leading to necessary "charge."
As learning takes place through voluntary interaction, the threat of
the classroom can be alleviated if learners are psychologically prepared.
In order to impress upon students the importance of practice for success,
the teacher could prepare a handout for the first class written in the native
language for the students to read because they will be more willing to participate
if they understand how classes operate.
Appropriate pair work tasks
Interestingly, Pica (1987) shows that modified social interaction was
not an inevitable outcome of students' working together, but instead was
conditioned by the nature of the classroom pair or group work activities
in which they participated. During the "penguin in a tuxedo" activity,
participants did little work to clarify or confirm message content, or check
comprehensibility. This leads to nonparticipation, truncated dialogues and
low on-task persistence. Although there is a sense of pleasure in stating
meaning that is felt to be one's own, there is a danger of frustration as
meanings are neither well defined nor easy to articulate. Both Prabhu (1987)
and Pica recommend information-gap activities, involving the transfer of
information in front of each student, rather than having them always come
up with their own. The participants must work equally and cooperatively
to complete the task, and to reach a successful conclusion, individual participants
cannot withhold information, nor can contributions be ignored. A classroom
event is created in which students strive to make themselves understood.
Hancock (1997) has noted that during pair work of participants of the
same mother tongue, the speakers switch between a "literal frame"
as their normal selves and a "non-literal frame" when they are
speaking the target language. The latter implies a performance and is "on
record," suggesting that it is for an audience. When participants are
tape-recorded they attempt to keep off record asides off the tape, and so
during regular pair work practice there is a need to heighten task-awareness
to encourage extended discourse. The idea of an audience keeping the student"on
record" is crucial, yet it is impossible for the teacher to be everywhere
at once. An idealised listener needs to be created, with tape recorders
one solution. If using recorders is not practical, using dummy microphones
or appealing to imagination to create such an idealised audience can also
be tried.
Keeping the students in English
Pair work does not always succeed in creating natural patterns, as task
design often makes learners so intent on "formulating their contributions
as determined by the activity rubric" (McCarthy, 1991, p. 128), that
they pay little attention to the contributions of others. This leads to
students ignoring the natural patterns of back channel and utterance completion.
Richards and Schmidt (1983) show that pair work conversations consist of
Q-A-Q-A exchanges. Learners need to answer, then give extra information
and then follow up by asking another question. Awareness training in how
turns are given and gained may help sustain on-task concentration, and tape
recording of pair work interactions may be useful here as well. Students
can be asked to consider communicative problems and evaluate the success
of various strategies. Lexical realisations of turn management can be taught
directly, and paralinguistic drop in pitch, head turning, eye contact and
gesture can all be made apparent through authentic video highlighting the
students' own communicative lack and significant cultural differences. The
teaching of "conversation" requires more than parroting dialogues,
in lip service to communication through situational encounters; it also
must focus on strategies for conversational interactions requiring more
than correct, grammatical sentences. Elicitation devices to receive topic
clarification, echoing parts of sentences for recycling and topic shifts
can be covered by considering both the transactional and interactional uses
of language.
Before undertaking a role-play exercise, brainstorming and topic generation
through whole class discussion of related language establishes schemata
and should cover vocabulary that the student will want to say. After introductory
activities, the students practice a dialogue that serves as a model, and
then performs a role-play with cue cards that have been prepared by the
teacher from authentic dialogues. The students then listen to, or preferably
view on video, native speakers performing a role-play and then compare the
differences between language functions and meanings. Feedback leads to heightened
awareness and the learners can introduce effective means and a range of
expressions into their strategic competence.
Conclusion
Questionnaire data can yield varied interpretations, along the lines
of the half full or half empty glass, and indeed looking at the tables one
could be optimistic about students' beliefs about the value of pair work
tasks. However the tendency to give up or to speak in Japanese indicate
perhaps that some students do not have a clear grasp of the key reason for
pair work: that languages are not learned through memorisation of language,
but internalising language that is made comprehensible through persistence
and an emphasis on understandable conversational interactions. Therefore,
the classroom teacher needs to raise students' awareness of the importance
of pair work and to teach strategies enabling the student to continue the
conversation. After all, simply put, one learns how to "do" conversation
by practicing it, and it is only when there is an incentive and a need to
communicate that the necessary communicative "charge" is introduced.
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