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MASARYK UNIVERSITY IN BRNO

Faculty of Education

Department of English Language and Literature

Teacher"s Role in Pair Work

Thesis

Supervisor: Written by:

PhDr. Alena Kašpárková Pavlína Berčíková

Brno 2007

2

Declaration:

I proclaim that I worked on this thesis on my own and that I used only the sources cited in the bibliography list. I agree with this thesis being deposited in the Library of the Faculty of Education at the Masaryk University and with its being made available for academic purposes.

In Brno 18 May 2007

3

Acknowledgment:

I would like to express special thanks to my supervisor PhDr. Alena Kašpárková for revising my thesis, for her valuable advice, kind and helpful attitude and considerable assistance that she provided me throughout the thesis. 4

Contents

I. THEORETICAL PART.................................................................8

1. Whole class teaching..................................... .....................................8

2. Teacher talking time....................................................................10

3. Pair work...............................................................................12

3. 1 Why pair work is necessary....................................................12

3. 2 Advantages of using pair work ...........................................15

3. 3 Problems with pair work and some possible solutions..............18

3. 4 Organising pair work in the classroom......................................22

3. 4. 1 Feedback session and follow up work...........................23

3. 4. 2 How to pair students off ......................................................25

3. 4. 3 Seating arrangement during pair work.........................................26

4. The role of a teacher............................................................................29

5. 4.1 The role of a teacher during pair work..........................................30

4.2 Teacher positioning in the classroom...................................................31

6. Correcting mistakes in pair work activities ........................................32

5. 1 Delayed correction.........................................................34

5. 2 Peer correction.....................................................................................35

5. 3 Observers...................................................................................35

II. PRACTICAL PART.............................................................37

7. The description of participants and methods..........................................37

8. The description of activities.............................................. .38

8. 1 Activity 1: Shamed! I have the messiest bedroom....................38

8. 2 Activity 2: Interview your classmates.......................................39

8. 3 Activity 3: Getting to know you................................................40

8. 4 Activity 4: Spot the differences.................................................41

8. 5 Activity 5: This is my favourite! Do you agree?.......................42

8. 6 Activity 6: A family tree......................................................................43

9. Observations....................................................................................44

9. 1 Observation 1: Shamed! I have the messiest bedroom..............45

9. 2 Observation 2: Interview your classmates.................................47

9. 3 Observation 3: Getting to know you..........................................49

9. 4 Observation 4: Spot the differences...........................................52

9. 5 Observation 5: This is my favourite! Do you agree?.................54

9. 6 Observation 6: A family tree.....................................................57

9. 7 Findings.....................................................................................59

10. The analyses of the questionnaire for students.................................61

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BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................... 68

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Introduction

In recent years there have been a number of exciting developments in language teaching.. These developments are sometimes reffered to as communicative language teaching or CLT. (Nolasco, Arthur 1988) According to Nolasco and Arthur a greater emphasis on activities in which students have chance to determine what they want to say independently on the teacher is among the most important features of CLT. The problem of getting students to express themselves freely in the foreign language has come to prominence.(Ur 1981:2) I do not want to disclaim whole class teaching since there are many occasions when a teacher working with class as a whole is the best type of classroom organisation.(Harmer 1998) However, "when we want all students to speak, and for as much time as possible, the simplest arithmetic will make it clear that a forty-minute period, even if every member of the class speaks, he will do so only a minute or two." (Ur 1989) Ur also points out that in reality even this is not achieved. I have chosen the topic of pair work for my thesis since it is one of the possible solutions of the problem how to get all students to speak in language lessons. I often use this way of interaction in my teaching, but I sometimes have a tendency to interrupt students when they are speaking together during pair work activity. I have noticed that they do not feel comfortable with my interventions. That is why I decided to observe students" behaviour to find out how this is changing with various teacher"s roles. My main aim was to find out what teachers actually do in various stages of pair work and what are students" reactions to teacher"s roles. I observed my own classroom to examine how many roles the teacher has during one stage of an activity. This thesis is divided into theoretical and practical sections. In the theoretical section I firstly deal with whole class teaching to point out to advantages and disadvantages of locksteps. In this part I wanted to underline the necessity of increasing students" talking time in the lesson. In the next chapter I analyse pair work as one of the possible ways how to get all students to participate in classes. I point out to advantages and disadvantages of using pair work and organising pair work activities in the classroom including seating arrangement and pairing students. Chapter four deals with the role of teacher during pair work which is also the main subject of the practical part. The last theoretical chapter describes several strategies of correcting mistakes in pair work. 7 I have divided the practical part of my thesis into three parts. In the first part I introduce the activities which I used for the action research. The second part deals with the action research. Its main aim is to focus on different teacher"s roles in pair work and to observe students" attitudes towards the teacher"s intervention during the course of pair work activity. The analyses of questionnaire for students is the topic of the third part. In conclusion I summarise my findings from the observations and students" questionnaires. 8

I. THEORETICAL PART

1. Whole-class teaching

The purpose of this chapter is to define what is meant by whole-class teaching, and to distinguish it from pair work, dealt with in the next chapter. I will point out to advantages and disadvantages of whole-class teaching to relate with necessity of increasing students" talking time and involving all students in the lesson. One of the possibilities for doing this are pair work activities. As Lewis and Hill proclaim (1992:23) most modern textbooks are based on "the communicative approach". The emphasis is on the fact that language is not used in a vacuum but by one person to another in order to communicate a message. This view seems obvious but the activities of the traditional language classroom ignored this aspect of language. I personally experienced this way of learning when I was studying at the secondary school. As Lewis and Hill describe we were taught in a similar way frequently reading texts in order to answer questions about the text. The only purpose of such texts was to examine the language of the text - the language of the textbook was not used to communicate anything else; the "comprehension" questions which followed such texts involved the students telling the teacher what the teacher already knew. I can support Lewis"s and Hill"s opinion that if such activities were communicative in any way, they communicated not the content of the text, but the fact that the student had, or had not, mastered the language as a system. It is possible for students to study material of real interest to them, and to communicate real ideas of their own through the medium of language they are learning. (Lewis, Hill 1992:23) Harmer (1995:205) uses the term "lockstep" for the whole-class teaching. Lockstep is the class grouping where all the students are working with the teacher, where all the students are 'locked into' the same rhythm and pace, the same activity (the terms is borrowed from the language laboratory). Lockstep is the traditional teaching situation, in other words, where a teacher-controlled session is taking place. The accurate reproduction stage usually takes place in lockstep (although this is not necessarily the 9 only way it can be done) with all the students working as one group and the teacher acting as controller and assessor. (Harmer 1995:205) According to Harmer (1995:205) lockstep has several advantages. It usually means that all the class is concentrating. The teacher can usually be sure that everyone can hear what is being said. The students are usually getting a good language model from the teacher. Lockstep can often be very dynamic. Many students find the lockstep stage (where choral repetition, etc. takes place) very comforting. Harmer (1995:205) also describes some disadvantages of lockstep. According to him students working in lockstep get little chance to practice or to talk at all. Lockstep always goes at the wrong speed. Either the teacher is too slow for the good students (and therefore there is a danger that they will get bored) or he is too fast for the weak students (in which case they may panic and not learn what is being taught). Shy and nervous students also find lockstep work extremely bad for the nerves since they are likely to be exposed in front of the whole class. Lockstep, where the teacher acts as controller cannot be the ideal grouping for communicative work. I completely agree with Harmer who claims that if students are going to use language they are learning they will not be able to do so locked into a teacher-controlled drill. And if they are to gain student autonomy they must be able to do so by using the language on their own. Lockstep, in other words, involves too much teaching and too little learning! (Harmer 1995:205) However, Harmer does not abandon the whole-class grouping completely. He says that it has its uses. Where feedback is taking place after a reading or listening task clearly it will be advantageous to have the whole class involved at the same time both so they can check their answers and so that the teacher can assess their performance as a group. Where pair and group work are to be set up clearly the whole class has to listen to instruction, etc. (Harmer 1995:205-206) Byrne (1989:14-17) summarizes the main points teachers have to keep in mind during whole-class work. When standing at the front of the class, they should look at students 10 and look interested in what they are saying. They should watch the students while they are talking and control the class clearly and economically. Finally, they should make sure the students get enough practice. Hadfield (1992:45) emphasizes the importance of developing strategies for maximising the amount of student talking time. Well- organised pair work is one of the most important ways of achieving this. Lewis and Hill (1992:23) also point out that teachers who recognise language as communication will see the necessity for genuinely interesting texts, individualised teaching, pair work, free practices, listening practices and many other classroom activities.

2. Teacher talking time

Lewis and Hill (1992:13-14) also say that most language teachers talk too much. It is not, however, sufficient for the teacher to avoid unnecessary talk. If the main classroom activity consists of the teacher asking questions which are then answered by individual students, it still means that half of all classroom language is coming from the teacher. They counted that teachers working in state school systems, for example, need to remind themselves frequently of a calculation such as following - if the students have four 45 minute lesson a week, in a class of 30, there are only 180 minutes available each week to be divided among students. Even if the class consists of no reading, pauses for thought, or other activities, but entirely of the teacher asking individual student questions which were answered immediately, the teacher would do 90 minutes talking and each individual student only three minutes. As soon as the practical difficulties are taken into account, this time is greatly reduced and a more realistic estimate of the time spent talking by each individual pupil would be perhaps a minute a week. In those circumstances it is hardly surprising if students" spoken English improves slowly! However, much the teacher may be anxious about it, it is essential that techniques are introduced into the classroom to increase the amount of student talking time. Oral work, pair work, and group work are not optional extras - for the students" spoken language to improve, they are essential. (Lewis, Hill 1992:13-14) Scrivener (1994:16) also underlines that the more a teacher talks - the less opportunity there is for learners. They need time to think, to prepare what they are going to say and 11 how they are going to say it. He suggests the teachers to allow the time, and the quiet students need. Teachers must not feel the need to fill every gap in a lesson. Explore the possibilities of silence. According Lewis and Hill (1992:12) there are many opportunities in a typical lesson for eliciting knowledge and information from the students rather than simply telling them. However, teachers should beware of all of the following:

· Explaining when they do not need to.

· Repeating themselves unnecessarily (for example, when asking a question). · Answering for students, without waiting long enough.

· Correcting too much and too quickly.

· Talking about something which interests them, but not necessarily their students. · Talking unnecessarily about the process of the lesson. (Lewis, Hill 1992:20) Lewis and Hill (1992:20) emphasise that students should be involved in the lesson. But that is very different from saying that all students should be encouraged to speak, or that the student who is not talking is not participating. It is the teacher"s job to involve everybody, but not necessarily to involve everybody in the same way. Some students can participate fully while saying very little. This can be frustrating for the teacher, but it is important to realise that you are there to adapt to and help the students and not to impose your demands on them creating stress and reducing learning and certainly not in an effort to change their personalities. Scrivener (1994:68) stresses that it could be useful to aim to say nothing while the activity is underway, and save any contributions for before and after. Similarly, getting out of the way might be a help. He says that if he stays at the front of the class, visible and clearly keeping an eye over everything, that might put students off talking. He might do well to slink away into a quiet corner of the room and watch with interest, but unobtrusively. I associate myself with his view. It is one of the most important aspects of the main stage of pair work which I will deal with in the next chapters. 12

3. Pair work

3. 1 Why pair work is necessary

Byrne (1989:31) says that unless you have a very small class, you will never be able to give your students enough oral practice through whole class work. If you divide your students into pairs for just five minutes, each student will get more talking time during those five minutes than during the rest of the lesson. From the learners" point of view, then, some pair work in the course of the lesson is absolutely essential. I support Lewis and Hill who claim (in 1992:17) that if language learning is to be a natural and relatively relaxed process the general sequence will almost inevitably be when the students work with each other asking and replying to each other in more or less controlled pair work. In general the lesson develops from strictly controlled pair work, where each individual question and answer is predictable, to less controlled pair work where individual students have a wide range. This is the student-to-student phase. There is a development from teacher-dominated to student-dominated activity.

What is pair work and other types of interaction?

Pair work is a type of classroom interaction when students are working with another student. This may be to discuss something, to check answers, to do a communicative activity, etc. (Scrivener 1994:214) According to Scrivener there are five types of student grouping common in the classroom: - the class working together with the teacher; - the whole class mixing together as individuals; - small groups (three to eight people); - pairs; - individual work. In any lesson a teacher may include work that involves a number of these different arrangements. Varying grouping is one way of enabling a variety of experiences for the learners. (Scrivener 1994:13) 13 Penny Ur (2000) describes several interaction patterns. She considers pair work to be a kind of collaboration. She has listed types of interaction patterns in order from the most teacher-dominated (1) to the most student-active (9):

1. Teacher talk

2. Choral response

3. Closed-ended teacher questioning

4. Open-end teacher questioning

5. Student initiates, teacher answers

6. Full-class interaction

7. Individual work

8. Collaboration

9. Group work

10. Self-access

Apart from 'open pairs", where students talk to one another across the class under your control, there are according to Byrne (1989:31-32) two main kinds of pair work. These are fixed pairs and flexible pairs. Fixed pairs are originated when the students work with the same partner (usually the student on the left or the right) in order to complete a task of some kind. In flexible pairs the students keep changing partners. Teacher must decide whether he can let the students stand up and move around the classroom freely. This will make the activity more interesting for them because they can choose the person they want to talk to. If the classroom is too small, the students will be able to interact with those around them without getting up.

When to use pair work in the lesson

Pair work does not need to be limited to any one stage of the lesson and doesn"t necessarily need to be seen as purely a speaking activity. For example, you could start your class with a vocabulary pair work activity where students take turns explaining words from the previous lesson to each other. Another opportunity to use pair work is before a reading or listening task where students need to predict what they will read or listen to based on the title of the text. There are also plenty of opportunities for students to work together after they"ve done the reading or listening to check and discuss 14 answers together. Pair work doesn"t need to be limited to the final stages of a lesson but can be interspersed throughout.1 Students can be put in pairs for a great variety of work including writing and reading. (Harmer 1995:206) Pair work can be for brainstorming, pre-reading/listening prediction activities and for checking and comparing answers, so quite clearly there are lots of different types of pair work. Peter Watcyn-Jones in his book Pair Work 2 (2002:7) suggests several types of activities for working in pairs, e.g. ice-breaker/warm-up activities. He uses warm-up activities for fun and to "break the ice" and for students to get know more about one another. In role-plays and simulations students play simple roles or act out situations they could find themselves in, such as ordering meal at a restaurant. Often the shyest students come to life when hiding behind a role. Information-gap activities are activities where students have to perform a task together. In some cases, one student has access to part of the information only, but by working together, they have to solve the whole. In discussion/speaking activities the emphasis is on students speaking together. They often exchange views or opinions and express agreement and disagreement. These are often referred to as 'opinion gap" activities. Cards and board games involve the use of cards or a board in some form or other. They are often game oriented. In problem-solving activities the students have to solve problems of various kinds such as jigsaw-reading problems and so on. Vocabulary activities concentrate on vocabulary learning or revision. Scrivener (1994:63-65) also suggests several communicative activities in pairs such as pair interview, pairs compare, picture difference, stamp collecting, planning a holiday and survival It"s also useful to remember that students should have a genuine need or a reason to speak together. Simply telling them to work in pairs does not make it a valid or useful technique. Creating a need to talk together either because they are sharing ideas and

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15 information or because they have different pieces of information or different opinions will make pair work far more meaningful. 2 If one student describes a picture in the textbook while the other students look at it, the communication is meaningless: why (other than in the classroom) would listen to someone describing something we can see for ourselves? It is a display activity, showing off language learned, but there is no communication here. We can, however, transform it very easily. If a learner describes a picture that the others cannot see and the listeners have a task, drawing a basic sketch of that drawing, then there is real communication and the 'describers" and 'artists" will interact with a specific purpose. This classroom activity effectively mirrors activities that learners might be involved in when using the language in the outside world - listening to a description of something over the phone, for instance. In real communication the language that the students use is largely unpredictable. There may be many ways to achieve a particular communicative goal. The main aim for students is achieving successful communication rather than accurate use of particular items of language. (Scrivener 1994:62).

3. 2 Advantages of using pair work

If pair work is new to the students, it is worth spending the time and trouble to explain its advantages and to encourage them to take full advantages by participating as much as they can and sticking strictly to English. ( PW Watcyn-Jones 2002:9) I agree with Harmer"s view (1995:206) that pair work seems to be a good idea because it immediately increases the amount of student practice. Harmer uses an example of imaginary class of forty students. Similar example was also mentioned by Lewis and Hill (see the chapter Talking time). If we have forty students in class we can immediately see that at any one time (in an oral pair work exercise) twenty students are talking instead of one. Pair work allows the students to use language (depending of course on the task set by the teacher) and also encourages student co-operation which is

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16 itself important for the atmosphere of the class and for the motivation it gives to learning with others. (Harmer 1995:206) There are some clear advantages to using pair work. First, in large classes it gives more students the opportunity to speak. Another reason is that students will learn from each other. Learning is not just a top-down activity where the teacher opens up the top of the student"s heads and pours in the information. By using pair work you give students the opportunity to learn from each other and learn from doing. Finally, pair work gives students a degree of privacy and allows them to try things out that they might not attempt in the more public forum of a class discussion or a teacher-fronted activity. When students speak with a partner only one other person can hear their mistakes (and, of course, the teacher can hear them if he or she is monitoring). This help gives shy and reserved students more confidence in their ability to use the language.3 I will summarize the advantages of pair work according to Watcyn-Jones (2002:9) in the points below: ··· Pair work gives everyone a chance to speak in non-threatening environment, i.e. with a fellow-student rather than in front of the teacher and the whole class. Students will learn from one another in a natural way that approximates more to the world outside and gets away from someone of the constraints of the classroom. ··· Pair-work activities are students-centred rather than teacher centred. Once an activity has been explained (and perhaps demonstrated), the students work independently of the teacher and at their own pace. This means the students really have an opportunity to see how well they can communicate in English. Byrne adds that it teaches them how to lead and be led by someone other than the teacher. (Byrne

1989:31)

··· The language produced during pair work is generally more natural and authentic than in teacher-led sessions. It is also more personalized and, subsequently, more memorable for the students. Byrne says that students can face and talk directly to one another, so it is much closer to the way we use language outside the classroom. (Byrne

1989:31)

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17

···· Pair work activities encourage co-operation between students since, in order to

complete a task successfully, they have to work together and help create a very positive learning atmosphere in class - one where they genuinely want to work with others. It also normally leads to students being less afraid of making mistakes. In addition, most students grow in confidence as they discover that they can complete a task successfully without constant help from the teacher.

··· Many pair work activities (especially of the ice-breaker type) lead to greater

personalization and students begin to express their own personalities in a more natural and less inhibited way. This again contributes to creating a better learning atmosphere in class plus a positive group feeling. Byrne adds that pair work allows students to mix with everyone in group. (Byrne 1989:31) ··· Many pair work activities are a lot more fun to do than more traditional exercises. Students who enjoy what they are doing are more likely to learn than those who find the work boring.

··· Pair work is dynamic and active. Learning cannot really take place unless the

students are actively involved in the process. Pair work keeps them active which increases their ability and desire to learn. It corresponds to Byrne"s idea that pair work provides some variety during the lesson.(Byrne 1989:31) ··· Finally, pair work gives teachers a break from being the centre of attention, from having to 'perform', be dynamic, interesting, and so on. Instead, the teacher can stand back, listen more actively and think up strategies for helping the students increase their knowledge and confidence. (PW Watcyn-Jones 2002:9) ··· It allows you to monitor, move around the class and really listen to the language they are producing. It takes the spotlight off you and puts it onto the students. ··· Gives them a sense of achievement when reaching a team goal (Byrne 1989:31)quotesdbs_dbs44.pdfusesText_44