Groupwork has become ubiquitous in language education, with the clear benefits of interaction and output on language acquisition. A body of research has investigated this interaction in pairs and small groups, and there is an increased understanding that individual group context is a key factor in determining the behavior of students. This article…

Despite progress in recent years, Japanese classrooms continue to present challenges for educators seeking to promote language learner autonomy. Adopting an action research/case study design, the present study explored how, in a 5-week student-led project, an intact group of learners could contribute to the development of their own autonomy. Data…

Group work has become an essential part of modern methodology in teaching and learning because it offers teachers a powerful way to engage students and provides students with opportunities for cooperative learning. This study aimed to find out the students' perception of using group work in English classes. Employing a survey design involving 50…

Friendship group activities, as one of the learner-centered applications of collaborative learning, promotes learners' overall abilities and have been warmly welcomed into English as a foreign language (EFL) classes in China. However, because of the complexity of the multi-level classroom life, sometimes this application becomes problematic in the…

This article is based on the author's doctoral thesis on the dynamics of interpersonal relations in the onsite classroom. Drawing on positioning theory (Davies & Harre´, 1999; Harre´, 2015), Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Lantolf & Thorne, 2007) and informed by the focus on interaction in Douglas Fir Group's seminal paper (Douglas…

This paper describes a research study that investigated foreign language students' collaborative practice in a blended, authentic learning environment. A group of intermediate and advanced level students of Italian at an Australian university interacted and collaborated with each other and with a group of native speaker mentors through a web-based…

Educational research on videogames has demonstrated benefits of using videogames as instructional tools in classrooms because learning becomes meaningful and interesting for students because it incorporates student's needs. The aim of this study was to explore the benefits and meanings of implementing videogames in a Puerto Rican public school…

Both cooperative and collaborative learning are learner-centered teaching approaches in English Language Teaching (ELT) to support active learning, shared learning, inductive learning, and autonomous learning. However, definitional and conceptual clarity of these two concepts did not receive as much attention as they deserve. As a result, these…

While motivation has been recognized as a key catalyst for the uptake of self-initiated professional development (PD), motivational changes that occur in the course of self-initiated PD practices remain unexplored in English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts and beyond. Yet this research area warrants closer attention since motivation is a dynamic…

Literature circles [LC] are student-centered discussion groups that use various roles to make reading meaningful, comprehensible and enjoyable. The current research investigated the questioning effects and students' perceptions of integrating EFL [English-as-a-foreign-language] literature circles through student-led Facebook Groups. Findings…

The present study investigated the effects of group set-up in a semester-long telecollaborative discussion forum project in second-semester German. In order to explore whether group set-up affects learning in discussion forums, small groups of non-native speakers (NNS) of German were partnered either with native speakers (NS), other NNS with the…

This study examines learner deliberations over their discursive plans during second language (L2) instructional tasks, which we call "intersubjectivity negotiation episodes" (INEs). We argue that these provide essential contexts for negotiations over L2 form-meaning mappings, known as "language related episodes" (LREs). Our…

This study compares two leadership styles, emergent leader (EL) and assigned leader (AL), to explore effective leadership in second language (L2) group work. ELs were spontaneously chosen by the group, while ALs were pre-assigned by teachers before the task. The study involved 45 university students, who were divided into seven EL groups (n = 21)…

Researchers and teachers often invoke context to explain their particular research/teaching issues. However, definitions of context vary widely and the direct impact of the context is often unexplained. Based on research showing contextual differences in second language (L2) learner beliefs and interactional behaviors, the current project compared…

Learning language in the classroom often means interacting with peers in small groups. There is a growing body of empirical research highlighting the factors that have an impact on student interaction and an increasing focus on the social context. This article aims to broaden the focus of research by considering the influence of emergent…