A Study On The Influence Of Peer Interaction Strategies On Learners’ Language Knowledge In Senior High School English Classroom

In recent years,with the deepening of student-centered teaching concept,foreign language classroom teaching has put more and more emphasis on the important role of peers in language learning.Peers play an important role in language learning.At present,although researchers explore peer interaction from different aspects,there are few studies on peer interaction strategies.The research objects are mostly focused on college students,and there are few studies on senior high school students.As a relatively new research field,peer interaction strategy has important research value.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the application of peer interaction strategies in senior high school English classroom.Under the guidance of sociocultural theory,this thesis uses conversation analysis method to analyze the collected recordings so as to understand the interaction strategies and knowledge acquisition of senior high school students.This study answers two research questions:(1)What interactive strategies do learners use during their collaborative dialogue? What’s the frequency of each strategy?(2)What knowledge do learners acquire under the influence of these strategies? What is the distribution of different kinds ofknowledge? The data resources of this study are four classes of Grade two in Baotou No.6 Middle School,with a total of 172 students.Before recording,through the seat sequence,the students were separated into groups of four,a total of 43 groups.Through the transcription of classroom recordings and the analysis of after-class interviews,this study draws the following findings:(1)In the process of peer interaction,learners use the following strategies:request for help,repair,request and give clarification,and the use of follow-up questions.The most frequently used strategy among peers is requesting for help,accounting for 50.23%.The frequency of explicit request for help is slightly higher than implicit request for help.Due to the limitation of language level,it is very common for learners to turn to their peers for help in interaction.The frequency of using follow-up questions is the lowest,accounting for 4.31%.The use of follow-up questions often used in daily conversations because it is conducive to the expansion of topics.But perhaps because the task of this study is picture-talk,students are limited to describing pictures rather than daily communication,so the strategy is not used frequently.(2)Under the influence of these strategies,learners acquire the most vocabulary knowledge.Grammatical knowledge is next,such as tenses and syntax.Due to the limited knowledge level of learners,peers can only provide simple grammatical help for each other.The acquisition of spelling and pronunciation is less.In addition,this study finds that in collaborative dialogue,the abovestrategies are often used in combination rather than isolation in the process of interaction.Besides,the role of scaffolders and scaffoldees are not changeless but shifted in the process of collaborative dialogue,which means that one can be either scaffolder of scaffoldee.Peers depend on each other to achieve a level of performance that exceeds their individual ability.At last,although the use of interactive strategies is conducive to the acquisition of language knowledge,the role of teachers in peer interaction should not be ignored because the development of students’ language ability is still on the rise.This study makes a preliminary exploration of peer interaction strategies in senior high school English classroom.To some extent,the results of this study can provide implications for senior high school English teaching.