rary clusterings of students within a single class session. Informal learning groups can be initiated, for example, by asking students to turn to a neighbor and spend two minutes discussing a question you have posed. You can also form groups of three to five to solve a problem or pose a question. You can organize informal groups at any time in a class of any size to check on students understanding of the material, to give students an opportunity to apply what they are learning, or to provide a change of pace.
Formal learning groups are teams established to complete a specific task, such as perform a lab experiment, write a report, carry out a project, or prepare a position paper. These groups may complete their work in a single class session or over several weeks. Typically, students work together until the task is finished, and their project is graded.
Study teams are long-term groups (usually existing over the course of a semester) with stable membership whose primary responsibility is to provide members with support, encouragement, and assistance in completing course requirements and assignments. Study teams also inform their members about lectures and assignments when someone has missed a session. The larger the class and the more complex the subject matter, the more valuable study teams can be.Nation have developed types of arrangement of communicative activities. He assumes that a useful way of classifying arrangement of these activities is to look at the distribution of the information needed to do the activity. In many activities learners have equal access to the same material or information and cooperate to do the task. Thus, P. Nation lists them:
the cooperating arrangement where learners have equal access to the same material or information and cooperate to do the task,
- the superior-interior arrangement where one member of the group has information that all the others need,
the combining arrangement where each learner has a different piece of information that all the others need,
the individual arrangement where each learner has access to the same information but must perform or deal with a different part of it [27; 167].
These four different types of communicative activities achieve different learning goals, they are best suited to different kinds of tasks, require different kinds of seating arrangement, and draw on or encourage different kinds of social relationships. In order for group work to be successful, each type of group work must have its most suitable choice of other factors.us now look at each type in turn to see how the principle of communicative work applies and arranged.
The combining arrangement is the ideal arrangement for communicative work because it ensures interest and participation. It may be noticed that ways of making other arrangements more effective often involve adding an element of combining. The essential feature of a combining arrangement is that each learner has unique, essential information. This means that each learner has a piece of information that the others do not have, and each piece of information is needed to complete the task. Here is an example involving a group of three learners: Each learner has a map of an island. However, on one learner s map only some of the towns are named and only some of the roads are indicated. On the second learner s map some of the other towns are named, the railway system is given, and the airport is shown. On the third learner s map the remaining roads and-towns are shown, the central mountain is named, and the forest is indicated. Each learner s map is therefore incomplete, and each learner has information that the other two do not have. By combining this information each learner can make a complete map. They do this by keeping their map hidden from the others and by describing what is on their map for the others to draw on theirs.best seating arrangement of the members of the group during this activity supports the essential features of the arrangement. Each learner needs to have equal access to the others to get the essential information while preserving the uniqueness of their own information. This means that when working in pairs the learners should face each other, because that allows good communication while hiding their written or pictorial information. When working in a group, it is best if the learners sit in a circle, so that each learner is an equal distance from any other learner. Equal access to each other is the most important element in the seating arrangement of combining-arrangement groups.social relationship amongst the members of a combi...
