Abstract

Pair work is widely adopted in second language teaching. So far a large number of researches have suggested that pair work has many advantages compared to individual work. However, many of the current researches in this field pay great attention to the final accuracy or scores of the given tasks, but a little attention to the process of pair work. Besides, the participations of the most current studies are not Chinese students. So this study is going to pay great attention to the process of pair work in a Chinese middle school class. It aims to find out whether Chinese middle school students can form new knowledge during the process of pair work and the possible reasons behind it. And it is also going to analyze the attitudes and personal feelings of Chinese middle school students toward pair work. Since errors are unself-corrigible failure in learners' competence, the study used an error correction pair work to test whether students can form new knowledge (correct their shared errors ) by working in pairs. Analysis of the pair talks, the results of error correction work and the questionnaire showed that pairs who produced more interactive LREs were mostly to correct more errors. Thus the results suggest that students' joint efforts while interacting and collaborating with each other give students opportunities to pool their understandings and linguistic resources together and thus result in their con-construction of knowledge about language. And the results of the questionnaire about using pair work in English learning suggest that the majority of Chinese middle students like pair work and consider it an effective way to learning English. But many of them need to improve their collaborative skills while doing pair work.  

Keywords: pair work; middle school students; error correction; new knowledge, LRE

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1.-Introduction-1

1.1 The Theoretical Basis of Pair Work-1

1.2 How to Pair Learners in Pair Work-1

1.3 The Advantages of Pair Work-2

1.4 The Problems Associated with Pair Work-2

1.5 Previous researches about pair work-3

1.6 This Study-3

2.-Research Method-4

2.1 Participants-4

2.2 Instruments-4

2.3 Procedures-5

3.-Data Analysis and Results-6

3.1 Language-Related Episode-6

3.1.1 Analysis of LREs-6

3.2 Results-8

3.2.1 Error Correction-8

3.2.2 Questionnaire-11

4.-Discussion and Conclusion-12

4.1 Interactive LREs-12

4.2 Pooling Linguistic Resources Together and Co-construct Knowledge-12

4.3 Conclusion-13

1.-References-14

1.-Appendix I-16

2.-Appendix II-20