Influence of collaborative group work on English language learner's oral narratives

Instructional influences on storytelling were investigated among 210 fifth-grade Spanish- speaking ELLs. Participants received a 6-week socio-scientific unit involving collaborative group work or direct instruction, or were in control classes that continued regular instruction. Then students individually told a story prompted by a wordless picture book. The assessment of students’ story telling followed the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) conventions. Analysis of story transcripts indicated greater syntactic complexity and narrative cohesiveness in the stories produced by students who had participated in collaborative groups. Results were attributed to increases in quantity and quality of talk during collaborative group work. A multinomial logistic regression analysis showed that students who had participated in collaborative group work generated significantly longer chains of reasoning (many 5-7 link chains) than students who had received direct instruction (many 1-2 link chains). The results suggest collaborative group work is an effective instructional approach to foster ELL’s oral narrative skill and causal reasoning. A general implication is that speaking is more than using correct expressions. Speaking in a second language is learning to think and reason within that language.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Ma, Shufeng

Contributors dc:contributor

• Anderson, Richard C.

• English language learner
• oral narrative
• collaborative group work
• multi-link causal reasoning

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2013 Shufeng Ma

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/44160

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/44160