An Exploration of Instructors’ Role in Implementing Group Work When Teaching English with Particular Reference to Debre Birhan College of Teachers Education

An Exploration of Instructors’ Role in Implementing Group Work When Teaching English with Particular Reference to Debre Birhan College of Teachers Education

ABAYE, Mulat Adane

Key words: Implementation of Group Work in Teaching English ABSTRACT The main objective of this study was to explore English Language Instructors’ role in Higher Education Institutions in implementing group work. To this end, Debre Birhan College of Teacher Education was selected as a study area. To gather information from the subjects (6 English Language Teachers and 75 students from Language Department) three instruments (questionnaire, class room observation and interview) were used. All English Language teachers who were giving different English Language courses as well as 30% of the total number of the students (75 in number) were taken as a subject. Simple random sampling was used to select the sample students; besides, to ensure proportionality of the two sexes as well as to take the proportitional number of students from each batch stratified sampling was also employed. The result of the study clearly showed that all the teachers were frequently incorporating group work when teaching English. Furthermore, from the students’ questionnaire, it was found that the majority of the students wanted to learn through group work and they had the experience of learning through it. In addition, it was found that the majority of the instructors appeared to have adequate understandings about the various roles they were expected to play when using group work in teaching English. However, from the classroom observations and the students’ response, it was found that the majority of instructors were not efficiently playing their expected roles in group work. And, though the study showed some factors which hinder instructors from playing their expected roles effectively in group work, it was also concluded that the major factor is negligence. Finally, based on the result obtained through the three instruments, it was concluded that group work was not properly implemented by the majority of English Language teachers. Hence, the importance of preparing short or long term trainings regarding group work especially for teachers by any concerned bodies as well as some other possible solutions were recommended to alleviate the problems regarding group Work.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1841