Students' Roles In Efl Classroom Group Work: A Group Dynamics Perspective

The use of group work has become a common feature around the world's language classrooms.In China,although group work has been widely used in the college English classroom,a number of problems,such as unwillingness to speak and unbalanced distribution of talking time among group members,are on the rise.This study aims to probe into student roles in EFL(English as a Foreign Language)classroom group work,to explore the channels through which group member roles influence language learning,and to make practical suggestions for teachers to encourage students to take on positive student roles.From the perspective of group dynamics,this research draws on communicative language teaching approach,two role theories(functional role theory and interactionist role theory),and four language learning hypotheses(the Input Hypothesis,the Output Hypothesis,the Interaction Hypothesis,and the Affective Filter Hypothesis).This study adopts a qualitative design and uses classroom observation and one-on-one in-depth interview as the data collection methods.The data are analyzed through procedures such as recording,transcribing and coding.The participants are 53 college students who enrolled in an extracurricular English course which aimed to improve students' spoken English.The author used the overall procedure derived from the grounded theory to analyze and to interpret the qualitative data together with the above-mentioned theories which are related to group dynamics and language learning and teaching in mind.The major findings are:(1)Student roles can be classified into three broad groupings according to three criteria: time of talking,task roles and relationship roles.The first category includes “dominator”,“normal person”,and “quiet person”.The second category includes “form dealer” and “meaning conveyer”.The third category includes “joker” “motivator” “gatekeeper” and “blocker”.(2)Student roles affect group members' English learning through four channels: input,output,interaction,and affection.(3)Based upon the interactionist role theory and the advice given by the students in the interviews,three practical suggestions are given for teachers to encourage students to take on contributive roles.