I-Chun (Vicky) Kuo
Department of Language Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK
North Holmes Road, Canterbury Kent, CT1 1QU, England, e-mail: ick1@cant.ac.uk
Learner perception of classroom student-student interaction in a British EFL
setting
Pair or small-group work has been a relatively well established and widely adopted
classroom practice in second language pedagogy. It should increase both the quality and
quantity of student talk, providing the opportunity to practice the target language for
every individual at the same time and creating a more private and secure learning
atmosphere in which learners are more willing to experiment with the new language.
While such a description would appear to be broadly encouraging, it is important to find
out how it has indeed been perceived by learners in widely different contexts.
This paper reports on an investigation into learner perception of classroom studentstudent interaction in a British EFL setting, where learners from different L1
backgrounds come to learn English. In order to understand more profoundly how learners
perceive the usefulness or effectiveness of such interaction, consecutive interviews have
been conducted, with an attempt to contextualize learner perception within the broader
experience of living and studying in the UK. The initially fragmentary life stories of the
learners, both before and after their arrival in the UK and inside and outside the language
classroom, are then constructed into a more coherent understanding of their motives and
goals, their expectations and appreciations of an English course in Britain.
Learners, for example, who look forward to significant improvement in English through
sufficiently frequent contact with native speakers (i.e. the British) might be left
disappointed for the lack of it and might, in turn, dismiss the interaction with other
learners (or non-native speakers) within the classroom context, whose English is often
imperfect or inaccurate. Learners who are relatively successful in learning a foreign
language other than English, e.g. an Italian student who speaks French or a Taiwanese
student who went to university in Japan, tend to recall what went well and what goes
wrong. Learners, above all, tend to appreciate cross-cultural communication or using
English for genuine communication purposes and might, in turn, dislike working in pairs
or small groups with people from the same country or the same L1 background.
As such, learners bring into a British EFL setting their own motives and goals, their
unique prior experiences and personal preferences. They form both initial orientation to
an English course in the UK and final perception of the overall living and learning
experience. At an intra-personal level, when they encounter a gap between their prior and
current experience, they base their judgments of the present on the relative easy or
difficulty of the same or similar experience in the past. At an interpersonal level, learners’
prior experience varies significantly. An important aspect of one learner’s prior
experience might not be found in another’s and, as a result, a proper understanding of
learner perception can only be achieved by incorporating independent but interconnected
biographical accounts.
Many of my research participants do not have contact with native speakers outside the
classroom. They tend to either speak their mother tongue with people from the same
country or the same L1 background, or speak English with other foreign students, whose
English might not be more accurate or fluent. Under these circumstances, my research
appears to have provided initially a good opportunity for my participants to engage in
long periods of English speaking and consequently a learning opportunity when they
encounter grammatical or phonological uncertainties in the course of interview. Some of
my participants show great delight after the interview sections, feeling satisfied with their
efforts to sustain the conversation on the one hand, and the little progress they make in
aspects such as grammar or pronunciation on the other. Issues ranging from how to
improve speaking or pronunciation to terms and conditions of applying for an MA course
in the UK would often be brought up at the end of the interviews.
As such, the interview has indeed become a forum in which my participants and I
exchange life stories, particularly those related to studying abroad, learning English, and,
perhaps more importantly, why we make certain decisions at certain times and how these
decisions have partly affected or completely changed our lives. As the research draws to
a close, I achieve a more profound understanding of who they are, what they want, and
why they perceive a particular classroom practice and a particular English learning
experience as such. My participants, in the meantime, have told their stories, practiced
their English, and hopefully come to both enjoy and appreciate such an experience of
international communication and cross-cultural understanding.
(753 words)