Table Of ContentGroup Work in the English
Language Curriculum
Sociocultural and Ecological Perspectives
on Second Language Classroom Learning
Philip Chappell
Group Work in the English Language Curriculum
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Group Work in the English
Language Curriculum
Sociocultural and Ecological Perspectives
on Second Language Classroom Learning
Philip Chappell
Macquarie University, Australia
© Philip Chappell 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-00877-0
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First published 2014 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-43581-4 ISBN 978-1-137-00878-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137008787
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables vi
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
Part I Interaction in the Second Language Curriculum
1 An Ecological Perspective on the Interactive Second
Language Classroom 5
2 Teacher and Learner Roles in the Interactive Second
Language Classroom 31
Part II Group Work and the Second Language Curriculum
3 The Social Functions of Group Work: Optimising
Interpersonal Relations 53
4 Building Field Knowledge through Collective Thinking
and the Joint Construction of Knowledge 80
5 Using Groups to Promote Oral Fluency – Language
Development in Interaction 111
6 Emphasis on Language Form and Function – Group Work
and the Development of Linguistic Knowledge 125
7 Using Groups Strategically – Negotiating Textual
Meanings through Group Work 152
8 Integrating Group Work into Lesson and Unit Plans 177
References 201
Index 210
v
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1 Basic mediation triangle 7
1.2 Relation of text to context 16
1.3 The relations between genre, register and language 28
3.1 Gaze, expression, posture and gesture realising
interpersonal relations 66
3.2 Building social relations through playful teasing 68
3.3 Deconstruction stage of task: building social relations 69
6.1 Emphasis on form: past modals 145
6.2 Tex and Joy negotiating and
co- constructing accurate forms (A) 147
6.3 Tex and Joy negotiating and
co- constructing accurate forms (B) 149
7.1 Strongly framed focus on text semantics activity 174
8.1 Theoretical and practical themes by chapter 179
8.2 Sample curriculum macrogenre 183
8.3 The teaching/learning cycle 189
Tables
1.1 Approaches to second language acquisition research 24
2.1 Teacher talk managing the pedagogic discourse 42
II.1 The pedagogic functions of group work 49
II.2 Theoretical principles: pedagogic functions of group work 51
3.1 Juxtaposing traditional and progressive pedagogies 55
3.2 Developing interpersonal relations through modelling and
demonstrating a learning task 62
3.3 Speech functions in congruent and incongruent use 64
4.1 Kinds of institutional classroom talk 93
vi
List of Figures and Tables vii
4.2 Speech roles, commodities and typical mood clauses
in interaction 106
4.3 Inquiry acts as acts of wondering 107
4.4 Scaffolding dialogic talk for building the field of discourse 110
7.1 Curriculum genre: travel planning and regrets 163
7.2 Sequence of text types, anticipatory schemas and small
group activity: travel planning and regrets 164
7.3 Steps in the curriculum genre: travel planning and regrets 170
8.1 The pedagogic functions of group work 184
8.2 Integrating group work into the task framework cycles 193
Preface
There is one central question that I have set out to answer in this
book: How does group work contribute to learning a second language
in the classroom? This is a question I first asked myself many years
ago, as a novice teacher, on one hot and humid Saturday afternoon in
a fan- cooled classroom of 25 adolescent English language learners in
downtown Bangkok. I had set the students a task to complete in small
groups, and as the six groups worked noisily together, I recall standing
in the middle of the classroom asking myself: ‘How on earth can t his
lead to language learning?’ I also recall moving around to each group,
looking on and listening in, seeing whether there was anything obvious
that I was missing. Some groups were working diligently on the task,
with some fine examples of English being spoken. Others were making
a lot of noise in Thai, and I failed to determine what was going on. One
group was sitting silently, and when I approached, announced in uni-
son ‘Finished!’. I walked back to the centre of the room, looked around
at the groups one more time and felt at a loss. And so began my quest
to seek out answers to this dilemma. Little did I realise that 20 years
later I would be submitting a book for publication that was providing
my answers to this question.
I realised early on that there were much deeper questions to be
answered before I could posit an answer to the core question. What
exactly is this thing called language that is the object of the vast
international enterprise of English Language Teaching? What does it
mean to learn something? How can learning processes be described?
How can language learning occur in classrooms? The questions kept
coming, and for quite some time, I was researching the literature
without finding anything of significance that I could relate to my own
teaching and learning context (see Chappell, 2010, for a full account
of this). However, I eventually found some answers, thanks to scholar-
ship surrounding the work of two great scholars, L. S. Vygotsky and
M. A. K. Halliday.
Vygotsky provided an early signal that learning in groups is a quite
natural, perhaps essential, activity for humans. The idea that new ways
of thinking and doing begin in interaction with others was an enor-
mously difficult concept to come to grips with when thinking about
language learning in the classroom. Yet after struggling with the notions
viii
Preface ix
of zone of proximal development, internalisation, externalisation, imi-
tation, semiotic mediation and the like, I was convinced enough that
a social view of learning, informed by sociocultural theory, is more
useful for my question than perspectives from alternative paradigms.
Halliday’s theory of language, labeled a social semiotic theory, and
which I was studying in my Masters in Education degree, kept nudg-
ing me to think how it might fit in with a Vygotskian perspective on
language learning. Indeed, I was not alone in this, and was delighted to
learn that back in my hometown of Sydney, whole teams of educators
and linguists were developing an approach to language teaching and
learning that combined these two views quite nicely. This also gave
me the motivation to explore Basil Bernstein’s work, which was being
applied by the Sydney scholars, which has enabled me to unpack the
relations of power and control that exist in the classroom, thus provid-
ing greater explanatory wisdom.
This book, then, is the record of my work undertaken to answer the
question I started out with all those years ago. While I think I have
learned enough to warrant the publication of the book, there is still
much to be understood about classroom language learning and teach-
ing, and I hope to continue these investigations for the foreseeable
future.
In the meantime, I present this book as providing some answers
to the question of how group work contributes to learning a second
language in the classroom by addressing two fundamental theoretical
issues. This refers to the articulation of a theoretical framework that is,
firstly, distinct enough so as not to be confused with mainstream second
language acquisition (SLA) perspectives on language acquisition, and
secondly, that includes the context of teaching and learning activity as
an irreducible unit of analysis. As I was searching the literature, I found
that there existed a great deal of research supporting and explaining the
benefits of group work in SLA; however, as will be seen in subsequent
chapters, this research was not addressing a significant theoretical
issue highlighted by systemic functional linguistic and sociocultural
theory – that of context. In this case, context refers to the totality of
the classroom environment in which the students and teachers are
undertaking teaching and learning activity. As will be detailed later in
the book, linguistically, context specifies all the participants involved
in the teaching/learning activity and their relationship to one another,
the nature of the teaching/learning activity itself, as well as the modes
of communication used in the activity. Including context in the unit of
analysis presented itself as a novel move, especially when drawing on
