“I’ll google it.” : Using online dictionary for conducting repair during pair and group work in upper-secondary EFL classrooms
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Pair and group work activities break the traditional teacher-centered structures of interaction and partly transfer the control of the teacher to the students, who are provided with more freedom in turn-taking and the management of the activities. In the study of how the students learn the target language, pair and group work repair sequences are particularly important in order to understand how the participants repair the breakdowns in communication and what processes for acquiring a foreign language they use. This study explores the different ways students conduct conversational repair, i.e. negotiation of meaning, during pair and group work. Specifically, focusing on the sequences when the dictionary was consulted, this conversation-analytic study examines how the students incorporate the dictionary in those sequences and how its possible presence might influence the roles of experts and novices in the interaction. The data used for this study consist of carefully synchronized audio and video recordings of students from five different Czech upper-secondary schools in their final year of studies during three or four consecutive EFL lessons. One of the central findings is that oftentimes the students try to conduct the repair through different means and the dictionary is used later in the interaction, which could indicate that the use of dictionary is viewed as a last resort to check the meaning with the dictionary entry, as well as a tool to strengthen and/or weaken the epistemic roles of the participants. |
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