Learning grammar in English as a foreign language speaking activities
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Speaking activities in which students interact in pairs to discuss some issues or solve a problem occur frequently in foreign language classes. Although such activities are designed communicatively, the students may identify some gaps in their knowledge of the target language (here English as a foreign language, EFL). This paper focuses on the ways students collaboratively turn such gaps in their knowledge of grammar into objects of learning, or learnables (Majlesi & Broth, 2012). It is assumed that the description of the practices that students use to identify the gaps in their knowledge and to interact in such situations may enrich the understanding of how students learn and use the target language in peer interaction, as shown in previous studies (e.g. Jakonen & Morton, 2015; Kunitz, 2018; Mori & Hasegawa, 2009) Using audio- and video-recordings of pairwork in intermediate and upper-intermediate EFL classes in Czechia (22 teaching hours in higher education and 15 teaching hours in upper-secondary education; multiple cameras and voice-recorders were used), this conversation-analytic paper explores the verbal, embodied and material resources (Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011) that the students employed to identify and act upon the emerging gaps in their knowledge of grammar. The findings suggest that the students identify learnables by employing a range of resources, such as repetition of the candidate form, pauses, manipulating the printed materials and eye-gaze. Such behavior typically initiates a side-sequence in which the students collaboratively attempt to overcome the difficulty, sometimes by switching into the L1 (Czech). In some sequences the students overtly correct each other (e.g. “I think you should eh say when I wanted to buy eh”) or visibly take notes. In this paper I will present detailed analyses of sequences in which the students focus on learnables of grammatical nature during a speaking activity. |
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