“I’ll google it.” : Using an Online Dictionary for Conducting Repair during Pair and Group Work Activities in Upper-Secondary EFL Classrooms
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Studie z aplikované lingvistiky / Studies in Applied Linguistics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://studiezaplikovanelingvistiky.ff.cuni.cz/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2021/12/Adela_Cervenkova_43-58.pdf |
| Keywords | conversation analysis; pair and group work; repair; negotiating meaning; online dictionary; epistemics; expert; novice |
| Description | Pair and group work activities break the traditional teacher-centred 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 activities. In the study of how 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 that students conduct conversational repair, i.e. negotiation of meaning, during pair and group work. Specifically, focusing on the sequences when a 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, which gives insight into the epistemic dynamics in learner–learner interactions. 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 to five consecutive EFL lessons. One of the central findings is that the students often try to conduct the repair through different means and the dictionary is used later in the interaction, which could indicate that the use of a 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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