Introduction
The effectiveness of group work has been highlighted often in
research papers, and now group work is accepted as a natural medium that
fosters communication. Considerable research shows thatcooperative learning
results in higher achievement and more positive relationships among
students.
The teaching of foreign languages is an interactive process
which involves the participation of both the teacher and the learners.Many
researchers have emerged classroom communication that involves interaction.
They showed the importance of interaction in bulding knowledge and improving
skills.For many years, English teachers have been using a varietyof techniques
to encourage interaction and participation among their learners.It is through
the interaction in the class as social group that the language is used and
learned, and the group is given a social identity and a social reality.It is
important to keep learners active in the classroom, which means reducing
teacher talking time in the classroom and increasing the learners' talking
time, naturally, they will talk to each other through groups where each learner
gets his time to talk.
Group work also known as Cooperative Language Learning
(CLL) has emerged over the past ten years as one of the effective methods of
language teaching and no one can deny that learners like to work in groups, and
if they do a good job, the benefits are many. This work intends to explore the
use of group work in an EFL teaching and to find out the impact of group work
on EFL learners speaking performance.The main objective of learning a foreign
language is to be able to use it for oral purposes. But unfortunately after
many years of EFL learning in school, advanced learners in Benin are not able
to use the target language appropriately in their daily communication. The
problem we are confronted with here is when the students exhibit a lack of
interaction which can be presented through their poor production, lack of
participation in the classroom and poor student relationship-learning a foreign
language and its components (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar for
intance) become extremely difficult to develop their oral proficiency. Thus,
teachers have to provide learners with a method of increasing language practice
opportunities. Organizing the class into groups is one of the most successful
parts to provide learners with extensive oral practice. The problem
investigated has not been clearlyexplained.
The present study aims at investigating the impacts of
group work on EFL learners speaking performance.Moreover it will
increaceteachers'understanding of the reasons for the difficulties in group
work, which may relate to the dynamics of group work or to learners themselves.
It draws EFL teachers' attention to the relevance of adopting group work
strategy as a relevant technique in their classes to fully improve their
learners' speaking skills.
To achieve my goal, I have divided my work into five
chapters.
In the first, theoritical framework, part of current theme,
impacts of group work on EFL learners speaking performance, is examined in
theoritical terms. This part comprises two chapters, the first is
identification of the study which includes a general introduction, the
statement of the problem and research questions and hypothesis, the purposes of
the study and the significance of the study would provide reader with an
overview of the whole paper. The second chapter deals with the researchers'
review of literature. It shows what other researchers have said about my topic.
It should also contain the definition of terms sections when appropriate.
The second part of the study, the field work, deals with
pratical issues. This part comprises chapter three entitled research methology,
the chapter four divided into two sections. In the first, all the detailed
information is summarized. In the following section the analysis of results and
their interpretation are presented. And as a final point of this research, a
general conclusion of the paper and and in chapter five general recommendations
are suggested. Lastly references related to the work are mentioned and the
annex pages is at the end.
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