Peer Participation in a Tailored-Crossword Puzzle Activity for English Majors in China

Abstract

Vocabulary teaching in an English as a Foreign Language environment can be painful and tedious. This paper adopted Tailored-Crossword Puzzle Activity (Shortened as TCPA) generated by the software for an exploration of vocabulary teaching to English major freshmen. This paper examines five dimensions of students’ TCPA group competition: group discussion participated; helped keep the group on task; contributed useful ideas; the amount work was done; and quality of completed work. The results show that, in general, one’s own participation is closely correlated to other group members’ participation efforts. Meanwhile, the difficulty of a TCPA has to be carefully controlled with the consideration of time and vocabulary amount.