An Experımental Study into the Effects of Structured Group Work on Students’ Collaboratıve Behavıours and Group Performances

Abstract

This study represents a piece of action research where the teacher aimes todevelop and improve her classroom practice of group work. The study exploresthe effects of conducting group work in two different manners: structured andunstructured. The study was conducted in 2014-2015 academic year at a privateschool, in Ankara, where English is the medium of instruction. Participants were 185th grade learners of English who were placed in three groups for experimentalpurposes regarding their learning styles. A one-group time-series pre-experimentalresearch design was adopted to carry out the study. To do this, a series of 4different group work activities were distributed over an 8-week period, placingeach group work every two weeks. The participants were instructed to learn newwords from the book Super Minds Level 6 (Puchta, Gerngross & Lewis-Jones,2013). After vocabulary teaching, the students were divided into three groups andeach group had different tasks.