MIDTESOL Matters
Summer 2001
A Publication of Mid-America Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

Helping Learners Help One Another: A Vygotskian Study of Group Work 

By Kerri Yost 

Research from a Vygotskian perspective typically examines how a language learner advances from one level to the next with the help of guided assistance. Vygotsky believed it was more important to examine a learner’s potential for learning with instruction rather than what a learner could do already. The metaphor “scaffolding” is used to describe the support a teacher or more experienced peer provides a learner so that the learner can advance to the next level.  

While Vygotsky was interested in examining how teachers provide scaffolding support to students as they climb from one proficiency level to the next, recent research has questioned if peers can provide the same type of scaffolding. Having taught children EFL in Austria, I wondered if they were also providing scaffolding for each other. In other words, can students teach one another a second language? 

I asked three questions as the basis for the study:  

  1. How does group performance differ from individual performance in a task-based activity in a second language?
  2. When groups collaborate during a task-based activity in a second language, how is language learning facilitated?
  3. Can peers provide scaffolding?
 

The Study and Methods

The participants in the study were six 10-12 year-old EFL learners attending a two-week, full-immersion-in-English summer camp. All the participants had had one year of English at school. At the camp, they attended English classes in the morning to learn the language they needed to communicate in English during the rest of the day’s activities. This study was conducted in the morning. 

The participants watched two language-free cartoons (Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner) and then retold the stories, once individually and another time as a group. There were two groups of three: Group G and Group I. Members of Group G watched a cartoon and retold its story as a group activity on the first day of the study. Three days later, they watched a similar cartoon and performed the task individually. Members from Group I watched and narrated a cartoon individually on the first day of the study and three days later they watched the other cartoon together and then retold its story as a group. The performances were analyzed by the amount of information the children could provide about the story and how comprehensible that information was. 

The Results 

There were similarities in the groups’ group performances. All participants struggled with vocabulary, especially familiar vocabulary they were having trouble remembering, and used each other as emergency dictionaries. They always asked a peer for assistance and never the researcher.  

The group performances also showed notable differences. Group G treated the task as a collaborative effort when narrating the cartoon as a group. Group G’s performance was a more natural, problem-solving discussion. Speech overlapped, there were no nominated speakers, and children took the floor when they had more to add or if they felt their peer was frustrated. This collaborative effort resulted in Group G providing more information and speaking longer. Group G also joked more with one another both while watching the cartoon and while telling the story. In contrast, probably because their first experience with the task was as individuals, Group I’s members treated the group narration as a series of individual performances, and they only sought or offered help to one another in emergency situations. 

The individual performances by the children in Group G differed greatly from those of the children in Group I. Group G’s children hesitated less than those in Group I, probably because the children in Group G had already developed methods for completing the task during their earlier group performance. Group G’s children also used multiple strategies to overcome difficulties, such as pausing to think about the task, switching to German, using gestures, repeating the sound effects from the cartoon, or describing words they did not know. No participant in Group G favored one exclusive strategy; when a strategy failed, another was implemented until the participant felt the idea was communicated. In contrast, each Group I child only used one strategy, either switching into German, pausing to think, or skipping parts of the story and moving on. Finally, Group G’s children appeared to enjoy the task more and experience less stress, even when they were working alone.

 

The opportunity to complete the task as a group made the task less stressful, more manageable, and improved the quality of the task performance itself. While working in groups, the children still had difficulty trying to describe a cartoon with limited vocabulary. However, when one peer would have a problem narrating, another peer would either help or take over the task. This ability to sense when a fellow peer needed assistance helped the participants overcome frustration. Because peers offered assistance if someone was frustrated, the task became more manageable. Group work also allowed the children to decide how the task should be completed and to judge their own performances. If a child felt he could add more information or make the narration clearer, he would take over the task. This combination of efforts led to a more comprehensive narration.  

Group G’s later individual performances also showed that the opportunity to complete a task as a group improved later individual work on the same type of task. Peers helped one another with vocabulary, took over the task when their peers faltered, reviewed and clarified peer contributions, and made less use of expert assistance. The children also used their first language as a tool to help them complete the task in English.  

 

The results of this study show that while peers of relatively the same age and proficiency level will offer help to one another during a task, this help differs from the kind of assistance a teacher or more experienced peer can offer. While the teacher sees the task as an opportunity to develop language skills, young learners see the task as a game. Young learners provide very specific help geared towards task completion, but teachers see the task as an opportunity to develop language skills, so they offer assistance that relates task performance to the larger goal of language learning. Since scaffolding implies a conscious effort to provide the support needed at the right time for the learner to climb to the next level, as well as taking the scaffolding down when the learner no longer needs it, this responsibility cannot be assumed by young learners but can be expected from teachers. 

Conclusion

Children can certainly learn from each other and will offer a helping hand or demonstrate a shortcut to help their peers climb the scaffolding that a teacher creates. They seem to help each other more and take advantage of assistance more when the task has not been performed earlier as an individual effort. In other words, the introduction of new activities might be a good time for group work so that children have the opportunity to see with open minds what their peers do. Since group collaboration seems to reduce stress and add an element of fun, perhaps children would also especially benefit from group work during activities that are inherently stressful. Group work further teaches the students to rely on each other and themselves for information and assistance. This will hopefully prepare them for life outside of the classroom where they will not always have the security of stable scaffolding provided by the teacher.  

In conclusion, children might not be able to create scaffolding themselves, but they certainly are able to help each other make better use of it as they climb toward target language proficiency. Because this study focused on young learners after only one year of English, the results are limited to children and beginning English learners. Perhaps the type of assistance peers offer each other might differ as they grow older and become more proficient in English. Further research is needed to examine how older language learners help each other during group work. Another limitation of this study is that all participants were at relatively the same level of English proficiency. More capable peers might offer assistance similar to a teacher, and perhaps more capable peers can consciously provide scaffolding. Further research examining how peers of mixed English levels help each other is also needed.

 

Kerri Yost is a winner of a 2001 MidTESOL Travel Award and presented a version of this research at TESOL 2001 in St. Louis. She is teaching and finishing her masters degree at Central Missouri State University and is interested in teachers as researchers in second language acquisition.