Viewing Group Work From The Perspective Of English Self-concept

Group work is a frequently exploited method in the language classroom. Based on sound arguments from comprehensible input, comprehensible output and negotiation of meaning, group work has proved to effectively facilitate learners in acquiring second language. The importance of group work has long invited a considerable amount of research conducted on it. However, although these studies have yielded fruitful findings, the criticisms with them are that most of the studies were conducted in a quantitative way, ignoring the significance of qualitative analysis in examining group work and that learner idiosyncrasy was not taken into full account in the studies on group work, which is argued to have significant influence on group work interaction.By exploiting both quantitative and qualitative analyses, by adopting a completely new perspective, English self-concepts, the present study considered how individual learners participate in group work interaction under two communicative settings: one-way information gap task and two-way information gap task. The design of the present study was due to two reasons: one is that task type is argued to be the most important variable influencing the quantity and quality of group work interaction; the other reason is that English self-concept, a term introduced to second language acquisition from psychology, is claimed to be an effective way in reflecting individual differences, thus it can well explain why individual learners participate differently in group work interaction.The present study was conducted in one university in Shandong Province with 80 first-year college students in Physics Department as subjects. The aims are to examine how they participate in the two different tasks and how students with different English self-concepts participate in group work interaction. The major findings are: the two-way information gap task generated a larger amount of modified output and negotiation of meaning than the one-way information gap task, assuming a more...