The Effect of Pair Work on Guessing the Meaning of Unknown Words in an EFL Context

Sasan Baleghizadeh

Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

sasanbaleghizadeh@yahoo.com

3rd ICASS November

2014

Advantages of Pair Work

Harmer (2007) lists the advantages of pair work as follows:• It dramatically increases the amount of speaking time each individual gets in class.• It allows students to work and interact independently

without the necessary guidance of the teacher, thus promoting learner autonomy.

• It recognizes the old maxim that ‘two heads are better than one’, thereby allowing students to share responsibility rather than having to bear the whole weight themselves.

• It is relatively quick and easy to organize.

Disadvantages of using pair work

The teacher is no longer in control of the class (Brown, 2001).

Students will use their native language (Brown, 2001; Carless, 2008).

Learners will be deprived of receiving “superior data” (Prabhu, 1987).

Some learners find it discouraging to work in pairs and groups and prefer to work individually (Harmer, 2007).

Cooperative Learning Theory

Pair work is a good vehicle for implementation of cooperative learning, as opposed to competitive or individualistic modes of learning.

To be considered cooperative, the group members should observe the following:

Positive interdependence, in which all group members participate to achieve a shared goal;

Individual accountability, in which each member of the group is held responsible for his or her own learning, which in turn contributes to the group goal;

Cooperation, in which students discuss, problem-solve, and collaborate together; Evaluation, in which members of the group review and evaluate their

ability to work together effectively and to make changes as needed. (Johnson & Johnson, 1991)

Significance of the study

Task type Year Studies

Cloze exercise, text reconstruction, short composition 1999 Storch

Dictogloss 2002 Kuiken & Vedder

Text-editing task 2007 Storch

Conversational cloze 2009 Baleghizadeh

Text-editing task 2010a Baleghizadeh

Word-building task 2010b Baleghizadeh

In recent years, there have been a number of studies thathave examined the effect of pair work on form-focused activities:

There have been very few studies, if any, that have explored the effect of pair work on guessing the meaning of unknown words from context.

Does pair work improve the performance of EFL learners on guessing the meaning of unknown words compared to when they do the same task individually?

47 Iranian EFL students (27 females and 20 males) with an averageage of 25 participated in the study. They formed an experimental (n=30) and a comparison group (n=17).

Two reading passages each followed by 10 vocabulary questions.

The participants in the comparison group did the task individually, while the participants in the experimental group did it in pairs following the Think-Pair-Share cooperative structure. The average time on task for the comparison group was 15 minutes and for the experimental group was 20 minutes.

Research question

Participants

Materials

Procedure

Groups n M SD t df sig

Experimental 15 13.15 1.24 5.20 31 0.001

Comparison 17 10.06 1.56

Results

Discussion

1. Promotive interaction driven by having a shared goal. When two learners are asked to produce one single copy of a given task, they pool their joint efforts to do something better than what they would have been able to do individually.

2. Time factor. Overall, the learners in the experimental group were longer on task than their counterparts in the comparison group.

The better performance of the learners in the experimental group could be attributed to 2 reasons:

A sample paragraph and sample item from one of the texts

Hotels were among the earliest facilities that bound the United States together. They were both creatures and creators of communities, as well symptoms of the frenetic quest for community. Even in the first part of the nineteenth century, Americans were already forming the habit of gathering from all corners of the nation for both public and private, business and pleasure, purposes.

What does the word “bound” in line 1 mean? (A) led (B) protected (C) tied (D) strengthened

Concluding remarks

Tasks of this type, when done cooperatively, provide learners with ample opportunity to negotiate for meaning.

Such tasks maximize the amount of time on task. The learners in the present study found the given task,

particularly in the cooperative mode, highly motivating: They unanimously asked their teacher to give them more opportunities for pair work.