Group work has become an important learner genre that can be found across a wide spectrum of disciplinary contexts in English-medium education. This type of collaborative work is mostly associated with preparation for a graded, high-stakes assignment, which is usually a written text but can also be an oral presentation. Universities often motivate the choice of this form of assignment by emphasising the role of team work for future employment.
In this paper, we conceive of group work as a genre: a staged, goal-oriented, social activity (Martin & Rose 2003) in which students engage as participants in their English-medium programme. It is social because it involves interaction between different people, goal-oriented because it is used to get things (i.e. the assignment) done, and staged because it usually involves several steps to reach the goal. In this study, we are focussing on students' reported experiences of peer collaboration during the preparation, and not on the outcome of the group work.
Taking the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz & Smit 2020) as our point of departure, we address the following research questions:
-How do the study participants present themselves as agents in this collaborative genre?
-What problem-solving strategies are reported in the collaborative practices of group work?
-What roles of English in multilingual settings can be identified in the students' narratives?
Our data include interviews with students taking an undergraduate English-medium programme in Business studies, which regularly attracts both local and international students in roughly equal proportions. At the time of the interviews, the participants in our study were at different stages of their programme (years 1, 2, and 3). Our analytical framework combines narrative (e.g. Georgakopoulou 2007) and positioning analysis (Davies & Harré 1990). Our particular focus is on self-reported problem-solving episodes and on how the students position themselves and their English language uses in relation to others, and others in relation to themselves. The analysis points towards the prominence of issues related to English language quality, expectations of academic text quality (outcome), and (dis)engagement by different group participants. Zooming in on academic text quality, lexico-grammatical and textual features are foregrounded to different degrees depending on the sub-discipline of the programme (e.g. Finance vs Marketing).
References:
Dafouz, E., & Smit, U. (2020). ROAD-MAPPING English medium education in the internationalised university. Palgrave Macmillan.
Davies, B. and Harré, R. 1990. "Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves." Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20, 43–63.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. John Benjamins
Martin, J. & Rose, D. (2003). Working with discourse: Meaning beyond clause. London: Continuum.
