L1 use in peer interaction: exploring time and proficiency pairing effects in primary school EFL

EFL child peer interaction: Measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction

“…Our results indicate that child learners could indeed negotiate for meaning and followed the same pattern as in previous research in EFL contexts, whereby the amount of meaning negotiation in relation to the utterances produced was remarkably low (Azkarai & Imaz Agirre, 2016;García Mayo & Imaz Agirre, 2016;Garcia Mayo & Imaz Agirre, 2017;García Mayo & Lázaro-Ibarrola, 2015;Lázaro-Ibarrola & Azpilicueta-Martínez 2015;Pinter, 2006Pinter, , 2007). Yet, L2 meaning negotiation was significantly higher than L1 meaning negotiation in a set of data where general L1 use while carrying out the task was much higher than in similar studies (63.28% at Time 1 and 32.01% at Time 2, Vraciu & Pladevall-Ballester, 2020). This indicates that NoM strategies are part of the children's linguistic repertoire in their target language and that, despite their low proficiency levels, the young learners in our study display a certain readiness to engage in NoM in the target language, just like low proficiency dyads in ESL settings (Oliver, 2002).…”

“…The second research question dealt with the potential effects of time, task, proficiency pairing and language on the children's use of meaning negotiation strategies (on the whole and for each category separately) both in the L2 and the L1. As for the general category NoM, no effects of time emerged from the data, although the two data collection times were two years apart and the same cohort of children had reduced their use of the L1 almost by half at Time 2 (Vraciu & Pladevall-Ballester, 2020). The lack of effects of time in the present study contradicts the effects of age/time observed in García Mayo and Lázaro-Ibarrola (2015), García Mayo and Imaz Agirre (2017), and Azkarai and Imaz Agirre (2016), where the older groups used fewer instances of conversational adjustments and repetitions.…”

“…As part of the same project on EFL task-based child peer interaction (Vraciu & Pladevall-Ballester, 2020), our participants were 40 bilingual Catalan/Spanish primary school children (21 male, 19 female) learning EFL in a limited exposure and low proficiency context. They were aged 9-10 years old at the time of the first data collection and 11-12 at the second data collection (i.e., 4th and 6th grade, respectively).…”

“…FL peer interaction has also been shown to bring about gains in learners' L2 competence, as manifested in their enhanced awareness of certain L2 forms (Kim, 2013;Kuiken & Vedder, 2002) or, even, in the uptake of grammatical structures and pragmatic strategies at an individual level (Alcón, 2002;McDonough, 2004). Nonetheless, at low proficiency levels, negotiation of meaning and reflection on L2 form in FL peer interaction often take place in the learners' first language (L1), which plays an instrumental role in task completion (Alegría de la Colina & García Mayo, 2009;DiCamilla & Antón, 2012;Vraciu & Pladevall-Ballester, 2020).…”

Exploring Indonesian senior high school teachers’ perceptions of first language use in teaching English

“…This includes the effective use of the students' L1 in classroom activities, since the L1 functions as a social tool for teachers and students to communicate with each other in English classrooms [11]. For example, teachers can deliver information using the L1 when they instruct students to work in groups, while students can also discuss the given information with their teammates using the L1 to ease them into structuring vocabulary, grammar points, and their ideas before delivering them to teachers using English [12]. Consequently, the use of the L1 could be useful in terms of running English classrooms effectively.…”