ning group needs to be one of equality. For this reason it is usually unwise for the teacher to become a member of a group unless the learners are prepared to treat the teacher as an equal and the teacher is willing to take a non-dominant role. Some teachers find this difficult to do. In addition, various status relationships among learners may upset the activity. Research by Philips with the Warm Springs Indians found that the way in which the local community s group activities were organized had a strong effect on learners participation in classroom activities [28; 370]. Just as social relationships can affect the group activity, participation in the group activity can have effects on the social relationships of learners. Aronson et al. found that working in combining arrangements increased the liking that members of the group had for each other, and resulted in a relationship of equality [29; 43].
Research on the combining arrangement as a means of achieving learning goals has focused on acquiring language through negotiating comprehensible input and mastering content. Long and Porter call combining-arrangement activities two-way tasks to distinguish them from superior-inferior activities ( one-way tasks). This research indicates a superiority for combining arrangement activities over teacher-fronted activities and one-way tasks" [30; 208].
The most suitable tasks for combining-arrangement group work include:
. completion, e. g., completing a picture by exchanging information, completing a story by pooling ideas;
. providing directions, e. g., describing a picture for someone to draw, telling someone how to make something;
. matching, classifying, distinguishing, e. g., deciding if your partner s drawing is the same as yours, arranging pictures in the same order as your partner s unseen pictures;
. ordering, e. g., putting the sentences or pictures of a story in order.arrangement activities do not usually present problems for the teacher. Group size is not a restricting factor. Strip-story exercises involving the ordering of pictures or sentences can be done with groups of 15 or more as long as learners can sit in a large circle or move about to have easy access to each other. One difficulty that may occur is maintaining the uniqueness of each learner s information. This can be done by getting learners to memorize their information at the beginning of the task, or, in pair work, setting up a physical barrier between learners. This physical barrier may be a cardboard screen about 30 centimeters highbining groups be made up of learners with mixed proficiency or with roughly similar proficiency? In assessing the spread of participation in the activity, P. Nation found that learners in a homogeneous, low-proficiency group had more equal spoken participation than learners in mixed groups [27; 89]. Johnson, DW found that most negotiation of meaning occurred when learners were of different language backgrounds and of different proficiency levels. Clearly, different goals will require different group membership [31; 49].
The cooperating arrangement is the most common kind of group work. Its essential feature is that all learners have equal access to the same information and have equal access to each other s view of it. This is because the purpose of a cooperating activity is for learners to share their understanding of the solutions to the task or of the material involved. Here is an example: learners are shown a picture and have several questions to answer about it, such as: If you had to write a one-word title for this picture, what would it be? What happened before the event in this picture? What are the characters feelings towards each other? The learners discuss their answers to the questions.best seating arrangement for the members of the group is to sit in a horseshoe with the material in the open end of the horseshoe, or in a circle if there is no material to look at. Similarly, in a pair the learners should sit facing the same direction with the material in front of them. As much as possible, all the learners in a group should be the same distance from the material and the same distance from each other. If the information is a text or a picture, then it is best not to give each learner a copy, because this would encourage individual rather than cooperative activity.requires some degree of equality between learners, particularly a rough equality of skill. Research shows that group performance is often inferior to the best individual s performance if there is an exceptional individual in the group. Thus, for cooperating activities it is best to put exceptional learners in one group rather than to spread them across gro...
