As part of the research on motivation, causal attribution studies have an important role in predicting and improving academic performance since controllable and uncontrollable attributions have an effect on learners' future actions. Following this path, the present qualitative study investigates the attributions of students in an English Language Teaching (ELT) program for the performances of their presentations as part of an oral communication skills course. Upon the completion of the course, a total of 83 second year ELT students scored their performances out of 10 and provided explanations for their performances. This data set illustrated their attributions and estimated future achievements. Data analysis consisted of two phases: first, the students were divided into two groups based on the perceived successes of their performances, and secondly, their explanations were examined with content analysis. The initial analysis showed that 20 students scored themselves as less successful and 63 students scored themselves as successful. It revealed that the less successful group attributed their performances mostly to their mood and lack of effort, both of which are categorized in the internal attributions. In contrast, the successful students attributed their performances to effort, mood, and strategy use, all of which fell into the internal category as well. From these results, it can be concluded that the learners had a higher locus of control in that they attributed their performances to mostly internal attributions. In addition, providing immediate teacher feedback and creating a classroom environment for vicarious learning were effective for increasing learners' effort and motivation for their presentations. These findings may imply that teachers focus on providing immediate feedback and create an effective classroom atmosphere that will probably lead to vicarious learning.
This study aimed to unveil collaborative actions in EFL task-based peer interactions. Collaboration in peer interaction has been mainly investigated by analysing language-related episodes (LREs). Assuming that an etic coding would limit the understanding of collaborative actions, a qualitative analysis of learner interactions, particularly sociocultural discourse analysis, was adopted for this study. The data include 11 hours of peer interactions collected from a speaking club designed as an extracurricular activity. The participants were 15 adult learners enrolled at a language school of a Turkish state university and they were informed to have B1+ proficiency level. The learners were grouped into three groups and assigned to complete two language tasks: divergent and convergent tasks in L2. The interactions were recorded, and by employing the constant comparative method, all the collaborative actions were identified in the data. Two broad categories of collaborative actions emerged; languagerelated and task-related, each of which has different subcategories. In this paper, the language-related collaborative actions, which are eight in total, are defined and exemplified with extracts from the data. The results present implications for the inclusion of peer interaction activities, especially in EFL contexts where learners have limited opportunities in participating in L2 interaction.
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