awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.4, 2014Group Work in ESL: A Teacher’s Perception and ApplicationAllhedan2. Mike Specific Orr beliefs about group workA) Benefits of Group work is a greatusing group work opportunity for languageB) Group work vs.individual practiceC) Fundamentalsof groupingstudentsD) Group workactivitiesE) Students’ use ofL1 during groupworkF) Teacher’s roleduring group worknegotiation.Individual students get furtheropportunity to practice thelanguage when grouped.L1 background, students’personalities, plannedgrouping, and shufflingmembers.Activities should integrateboth individual and groupwork.It is prohibited since they donot need it.She should be a facilitator,monitoring all groups withoutbeing strongly present.Groups negotiated andreconstructed meaning.Individuals participatedwithin their groups withvaried degrees.Counterbalanced groups,though no shufflingobserved.Activities required thestudents to workindividually beforeworking in groups.Students used their L1declaring that theysometimes need it.She was strongly presentwith one group,dominating the discussion.ConsistentConsistent tosome extentConsistent tosome extentConsistentInconsistentInconsistentDiscussionThe aim of this research was to identify the relationship between an ESL teacher’s beliefsand practices. The beliefs were divided into general learning beliefs and specific beliefs relatedto the use of group work in the ESL classroom. The data was triangulated to identify thisrelationship. The overall results indicate that the teacher’s beliefs were not always aligned withher practices, and this discrepancy was more evident in the context of group work.Although the teacher acknowledged that she did not intend to ground her teachingpractice on any specific approach, based on the interview and class observations, it can beconcluded that her beliefs on second language learning and teaching techniques resonate with thecentral features of the Communicative Language Approach (CLT). In addition, the teacherimplemented a significant amount of group work to create opportunities for genuine classroominteraction, which is consistent with what Ellis (2005) discusses: by creating opportunities topractice input and obtain feedback on the generated output, students naturally develop theirgrammatical and sociocultural linguistic systems while being pushed to interact with otherswithout paying close attention to linguistic accuracy when acquiring the language.However, the teacher’s approach of developing communicative language competenceinvolved teaching students aspects of communicative competence more than creating tasks forlearners to engage in communication that led to learning, as in the case of Task Based LanguageTeaching (TBLT). Group work was initiated by individual work, and the activities were staged tofollow samples, produce language, and obtain feedback from peers. The purpose of initiatinggroup work with individual work may be to ensure that all individuals are producing a linguisticoutput and to have them interact to provide corrective feedback that modifies their output. It wasclear that students were interacting to express their ideas on the topic, and peers were asking forclarification on ideas and scaffolding each other. This process adheres to the principles of theArab World English Journalwww.awej.org 478ISSN: 2229-9327