Talking Together: Working Towards Better Group Work

Jessica Watson, UK

Jessica Watson is the Academic Manager at Regent Edinburgh. She is interested in speaking skills, learner autonomy and teacher development. She hosts www.DoitinEnglish.com – a website of useful links for learners – taking them to sites where they can do whatever they want to do on the Internet in English. Email: jessica.watson@regent.org.uk

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Introduction
Lesson outline
More information
References

Introduction

Group work can often be a disaster area – our students don’t speak, or only listen to the oldest male, or don’t give reasons… and so on! They don’t follow our ‘rules’ for group work. This does not only impact the ‘success’ of our classes, but also the students’ future academic success, as our rules for group work are also the rules followed in a western academic setting.

ESL students who have not had access to western academic discourse may be disadvantaged: if they are to be successful in western academic contexts it is vital that they can understand and produce academic discourse. A discourse can be explicitly taught and learnt, and native speaker primary school children are taught an academic discourse useful in reasoning. Wegerif, Mercer et al’s ‘Thinking Together’ programme promotes a type of talk common to academic discourse, and has been successful in U.K. primary schools. The ‘Thinking Together’ programme takes advantage of the fact that every discourse has a set of ground rules associated with it, and children are encouraged to agree on and follow ground rules about how to solve problems together. After children have followed the Thinking Together programme, their group reasoning skills improved and, more interestingly, their individual reasoning skills also improve.

Children moved from dialogues like this… …to dialogues like this: Tess: It’s that. Greg: It’s that. 2. Tess: 2 is there. Greg: It’s 2. Tess: 2 is there, Greg. Greg: It’s 2. Greg: A line like that, a line like that and it ain’t got a line with that.
Tess: It’s got to be that one.
Greg: It’s going to be that don’t you think?
Tess: Because look all the rest have got a line like that and like that, I think it’s going to be that because….I think it’s number 6.
Greg: Wait, no, we’ve got number 6, wait, stop, do you agree that it’s number 1 because look that one there is blank, that one there has got them, that one there has to be number 1 because that is the one like that. Yes. Do you agree?

We can use a similar programme in EFL. Advantages include better group work, where more of the students take a more equal part in the class and a more frequent use of reasoning words such as ‘because’ and ‘if’, as well as modal verbs to (for example) express degrees of certainty.

Lesson outline

We can introduce our students to this in five steps:

1. Raise awareness
2. Introduce rules for group work
3. Language skills
4. Practice
5. Keep it going!

1. Raise Awareness

Ask students to discuss some or all of these statements in groups of three:

“You are naturally good at talking, or not, and nothing can be done about it.”
“You can never tell what anyone else thinks.”
“If you think someone is wrong, it is important to tell them.”
“It is rude not to join in a group discussion.”
“It is rude to disagree with other people.”
“When other people talk, you can be thinking what you will say next.”
“Group activity is good for learning.”
“Listening means being quiet.”
“If you ask questions it shows that you don’t know anything.”
“Quiet people are thinking interesting things they don’t want us to know.”
“Learning to talk and work with other people is important.”
“People make fun of you if you let them know what you really think.”
(http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/resources/Talking_points_about_group_talk.pdf)

Feedback

We can probably agree that talking in groups is important, but we may disagree about how we talk in groups: for example whether we should disagree with other people or not. We can also probably agree that there are different rules for working in groups in different cultures.
Tell the students that today you are going to work on the rules for group work that we tend to follow in western academic contexts, and/or that we would like to follow in our class.

2. Rules for group work

How you introduce the rules to your class will depend on you and your students. You could elicit the rules from them. Alternatively you could give them the rules mixed up, or dictate the first halves of the rules for them to complete, or have a running dictation activity. The students need to end up with the following rules:

You must share all your information.
You must give reasons and explanations.
You must ask for reasons.
You must listen to everyone’s ideas and opinions.
You must encourage every in the group to speak.
The group must try to agree.
Everyone in the group is responsible for good group work.

3. Language skills

We need to be explicit about the language students can use to follow the rules.
Put each of the rules in the centre of a sheet of A4 paper or card, and ask groups of students to add some sentences or language functions that would be useful to use to follow each rule. Doing this with your students might be a good way of finding out how much your students already know, and what they need more work on.

It might be worth doing some work/practice on modals (‘it might/could/must be true’), if sentences (‘if this is true here then, it must/might/could be true there too’), cause and effect sentences (‘we must/might/could choose this one, because that one is …’) and a tense review (‘this one is true now, but that was true ten years ago’).

4. Practice

Once students have understood the rules and looked at some ways of following them, they need practise in using them. Try a simple decision making activity, for example:

“Your group have won £10,000 to spend on a holiday together! Congratulations! You should talk together and decide where you want to go, for how long, what you’ll do there and what sort of place you want to stay in.”

Feedback: Ask students whether using the rules worked. To get better feedback, ask them to complete a feedback form, then to compare their results in their groups.

5. Keeping it going!

Here are some ideas for keeping the rules in place:

• Ask students to induct new students into the rules
• Relate group work feedback to the use of the rules
• Give one student in each group the task of listening to check that the rules are being followed
• Remind students of the rules on a regular basis
• Include assessment of use of the rules in speaking assessment
• Keep a poster of the rules on your classroom wall
• Relate language work you do to following the rules

More information

You can find out more about the Thinking Together programme as used in primary schools here - http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk Good luck with implementing the rules, please email me and let me know how you get on! Jessica@DoitinEnglish.com, or Jessica.Watson@regent.org.uk

References

http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk Mercer, N (2000) Words and Minds: how we use language to think together, Routledge

Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.