Nicole Servais, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA

Nonnative English speakers (NNESs) who are also international students face a variety of adjustment factors when studying at English-speaking universities. Discussion skills (Holmes, 2004) and other speaking tasks (Cheng, Myles, & Curtis, 2004) can be considered among the most challenging. In an internal needs analysis at the University of Delaware, a survey of university faculty regarding the behaviors of nonnative-English-speaking international students showed that faculty and students alike perceived that NNESs were unsuccessful at leading discussions, participating in discussions, and speaking clearly (Caplan & Stevens, 2017).

In an effort to proactively address these issues of effective communication and participation in group work and discussions, I developed a structured group share project for use in an English through Drama course. The course naturally included many opportunities for group-based learning, and the incorporation of this project was relatively simple and did not disrupt the flow of the class. The project draws on the jigsaw instructional strategy and the principles of cooperative learning and positive interdependence (Johnson & Johnson, 2009) to maximize engagement. Scaffolding strategies provide initial maximal instructor support before gradual withdrawal of the support structures.

The Project

When working with students, I begin with a basic introduction to polite strategies for interruption, agreement, and disagreement, including the concept of hedging, which students find very useful. After outlining the basics of polite group discussion, I introduce cooperative learning strategies by describing group roles. Students select their own roles from role cards (leader, recorder, reporter, English monitor) that contain some sample sentence stems and a job description. Here, too, an element of scaffolding is added—students who are more reticent can begin in simpler, observatory roles while students who are more outgoing can begin in leadership roles. However, the expectation is that by the end of the marking period, all students will have assumed a leadership role at least once.

The project itself, which is a group discussion of a movie or a play, asks that each participant in the group take on one section of the content (i.e., the leader will discuss the plot, the recorder will discuss the characters, the reporter will discuss the themes, and the English monitor will discuss the conflict) in a jigsaw format. Before holding the first discussion, students listen to a virtual fishbowl discussion. Because instructional time in an intensive English program is already at a premium, I find it most expeditious to provide a recorded example discussion where the participants follow most of the positive strategies and greatly avoid the negative communication strategies that we review in the course. (Note that this will likely not be possible the first time you run the project unless you enlist colleagues and students to record a sample discussion; select the best possible example from your first discussion and use it as your fishbowl example for future discussion projects.) Students listen to the fishbowl discussion and analyze it for politeness and effective use of roles. After the first discussion and subsequent discussions, students engage in a metacognitive exercise asking them to reflect on their experience in the group.

The project itself is easy to adapt to different language levels by increasing or reducing the amount of scaffolding provided. It’s also adaptable to different content.

Self-Reported Student Outcomes and Next Steps

At the end of the marking period, I ask students for their feedback on the tasks that they have completed in the course. A large percentage of students reference the group share projects as beneficial in their development of English language skills, particularly the sociolinguistic elements of politeness, group work division, and roles. Students also refer to their increased confidence in speaking overall, though students largely attribute this to the general speaking focus of the English through Drama course. Students also point out that the jigsaw structure of the project helps them to feel more personally responsible for their own work in the context of the work of the group. Though I have not yet conducted any follow-up questioning once the students matriculate to see whether these perceived benefits have produced actual benefits in their university courses, this could be an area for potential future research.

References

Caplan, N. A. & Stevens, S. G. (2017). Step out of the cycle: Needs, challenges, and successes of international undergraduates at a U.S. University. English for Specific Purposes, 46, 15–28.

Cheng, L., Myles, J., & Curtis, A. (2004). Targeting language support for non-native English-speaking graduate students at a Canadian university. TESL Canada Journal, 21(2), 50–71.

Holmes, P. (2004). Negotiating differences in learning and intercultural communication. Business Communication Quarterly, 67(3), 294–307.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (2009). An educational psychology success story: Social interdependence theory and cooperative learning. Educational Researcher, 38(5), 365–379.