awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.4, 2014Group Work in ESL: A Teacher’s Perception and ApplicationAllhedanInteraction Mike Orr Hypothesis, to which Ellis (2005) refers. Ellis also stressed, within the framework ofthis hypothesis, the importance of having students express their ideas in interactions, just whichthe students did when they talked about their ideas within the group.Additionally, the teacher explicitly clarified several times that her objective was for thestudents to attain fluency by understanding the function of the language and that she did not wantthem to focus on grammar because they will not become grammarians. She believed thatgrammar should be taught inductively rather than deductively, following one of the mostimportant principles of instructed language learning: learners focus on form (Ellis, 2005).The teacher’s focus on learning through collocations is further proof that CLT is deeplyrooted in her beliefs. The lexical approach, as explained by Brown (2007), is more concernedwith building learners’ language through words and word combinations. Although this approachis not very communicative, the teacher practiced an updated version of it by pushing her studentsto look for word collocations and practice them in groups instead of focusing on accumulatingwords. Nonetheless, it is significant that this approach is of little importance in learning L2 forcommunication, and its implementation in language production as a whole remains unclear(Brown, 2007).Furthermore, although the teacher’s beliefs showed that she followed a communicativelanguage approach (particularly in the way she expressed her error correction methods), inpractice, she was correcting students’ errors immediately through recasting regardless of whetherthe errors impeded the students’ meaning. This practice is more closely related to the rationale ofthe audiolingual method regarding the importance of correcting students’ errors immediately toprevent their reinforcement. One reason for this discrepancy might be related to what Borg(2003) refers to as the influence of the teacher’s past learning experiences and encounters withher teachers during her school years. I believe that the teacher’s emphasis on correcting all errorswas unconscious because it was deeply rooted in her cognition of addressing errors.Brown (2007) states that autonomy is an important principle of mastering a foreignlanguage, and it can be practiced by giving the students an opportunity to express themselvesand to take initiative in class. By pushing her students to express their ideas and to give feedbackto other group members and by guiding them to resources outside of the classroom, the teachernot only practiced her beliefs regarding learners' autonomy, but also expressed her belief thatextensive L2 input was required for successful language learning (Ellis, 2005).In practice, the strategic formation and maintenance of groups is directly related to thequality and quantity of group interaction. In this research, the teacher indicated her awareness ofthe importance of group-building and spent a great deal of time and effort to establish effectivegroups in her class. The teachers’ methods provide practical instructional suggestions forfacilitating group dynamics for ESL teachers. First, in ESL classes with varied L1 backgrounds,the teacher should always take the L1 into consideration by creating heterogeneous groups toachieve the maximum benefit of communicative practice, including give and take and thenegotiation of meanings. Second, it is helpful to move students around regularly and toencourage them to interact with each other to prevent rigid seating patterns. Students naturallyestablish their desks as their "territories" and feel reluctant to adjust to new groups that couldgenerate genuine interaction. Moreover, the inter-member relationship is particularly relevant toESL teachers when forming effective groups. The teacher demonstrated a good example ofsuccessfully coping with the conflict between group members with different personalities whenshe put three active and dominant students in one group to form an interesting and competitiveenvironment within the group. She did not panic when the three students were hostile to eachArab World English JournalISSN: 2229-9327www.awej.org479