The Importance of Pair Work

This was originally going to be a comment on Willy Cardoso’s Blog – Authentic Teaching, but it got to be so long I decided to make it a post all its own.  As a result, it also connects to Kalinago’s dogme questions of the week, which I was going to address anyway.

A maxim we often learn (and that I push) in training courses is the importance of pair work.  Willy commented that some learners prefer to work alone and that pair work is often over-relied upon with the ESL classroom.   I would disagree.

I have had many learners that prefer working alone.  In fact, I am one of those learners myself.  But language is co-constructed; it is social.  We don’t learn language to think to ourselves in a foreign tongue.  We learn it to learn how to communicate to and with others.

This is why pair/group work is so important.  The students need to learn how to communicate with other individuals.  It’s the spontaneous nature of such communication that is of value within pair and group work.  You can learn a lot on your own, but to then access that knowledge in a split second while another person is talking is another matter entirely.

I, for one, learned a large amount of grammar and vocabulary on my own when I first started learning Turkish.  Yet, my level of conversation remained agonizingly slow and stilted.  I hadn’t acquired the skill or automaticity required to actually participate in my new linguistic world.

Whenever I have a student that prefers to work alone, I always pull them aside and ask them to help out in some way.  Perhaps, rather than preferring not to work with a student because you are better than them, help them instead.  After all, one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others.  Or they can help me out by walking around and monitoring students, offering feedback, etc.

Finally, one of the most important skills for global citizens is learning to work with others as part of a team.  Few people are learning English only for passive purposes.  The majority are learning, or being forced to learn it, with the expectation that they will use it to communicate with others in English.  Effective communication and teamwork are such important skills in their own right, that I think we have to encourage them as primary components of our classrooms.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for some individual reflection – this is important too – but I think the majority of that can be saved for outside the classroom.   If a student prefers learning on their own so much, why take a course?  If they are forced to be there, they will study on their own when they get home, so it’s not like they have to be with a partner all the time.

For all these reasons, pair/group work is essential to the ESL classroom or any classroom as far as I’m concerned.

Another point Willy makes is that there is often a problem with the “now talk to the person next to you” activity and I would agree.   This activity is often aimless and has no connection to anything the learners actually want to talk about.

What dogme points out is that this communications MUST be meaningful to the learners.  It should be something they want to discuss and which they have not already discussed before with their partner (in L1).  You can make pair work goal-oriented. – rather than talking being the goal in itself, something should be accomplished, decided, resolved, planned,or etc.

However, real communication begets itself.  Much of our conversation is just idle chatter, but we are interested in it, we have some investment there.  That interest and investment lies in the spaces between the participants in the classroom.  It’s the ties that relationships are built upon and it takes place where the language is relevant and meaningful.  This interactivity, this natural desire to communicate, is ultimately what dogme tries to tap into.

Some questions to think about with pair/group work:

Why are students working together?  Is there a social, communicative, linguistic aim or are they talking just to talk

Do the students know why they are working together

Do the students have a goal or end point in mind

Do the students actually care about what they are being asked to do?  Is there personal investment

Is it relevant to the students’ lives and learning goals

Do the students have the language necessary to talk about the topic or complete the task