On How To Pair Students In College English Class Activities

At present, there is a prevalence of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in China, which is possibly attributed to implementation of the national curriculum reform. In line with the requirements of it, the CLT emphasizes the necessity of a shift of teacher-dominated classroom to learner-centered one.One major method of CLT in English language classroom is pair work. As its name suggests, pair work refers to that the English teacher divides the class into pairs and the learners interact with their corresponding partners. This is an effective means for a number of reasons:increasing amount of learners’speaking time (e.g., Long and Porter,1985), improving the quality of learner talk based on more language output modified by interaction and negotiation (Doughty and Pica,1986), promoting learners’responsibility and autonomy (Brown,1994), creating more opportunities to use spontaneous language (Johnson,1995), and reducing learners’anxiety, and so on and so forth.The present study is conducted to solve two main questions presented as follows:1. How do learners’English proficiency and the formed communication (or interaction) pattern respectively and collaboratively exert influence on learners’pair work performance?2. What are the reasonable ways to pair the competent learners (C) and the relatively incompetent ones (I) in pair work in terms of learners’language proficiency and the communication patterns?68sophomores from Central China Normal University are invited to be the participants of the experiment,15pairs’transcribed discourse served as the source of data are analyzed in time with the help of Excel. The findings reveal that learners have similar amount of attention on foreign language (FL) use regardless of their FL proficiency and that they tend to constantly resort to their first language (LI) to seek help, which is not in line with what Leeser (2004) and Storch (2012) found. The best pairing for the competent learners is to allocate them into the both-competent-member pairs (C-C); meanwhile, the pair members have to form a collaborative or expert/novice relationship. In this case they give adequate focus on foreign language (FL) use as well as produce a good amount of FL output. However, when they are paired with the incompetent learners, their FL language words production are both hindered.