The Development of FL Oral Production and Autonomy Through Peer Collaboration and the Use of ICT

Abstract

This paper focuses on the development of learner autonomy and foreign language oral production through peer collaboration in a Brazilian teacher education program. Brazilian students seldom have the opportunity to speak English beyond the classroom. In pre-service English teacher development, few students are proficient in the language, and to become teachers, they all need to make the most of opportunities to improve their competence in the language and to familiarize themselves with all the aspects of teaching and learning. This situation and the fact the university had an underused ICT laboratory for teacher development, led to the organization of a social learning space to stimulate autonomous work and collaboration among students beyond the classroom. A few students participated as volunteer collaborators, and their engagement in the activities was analyzed to find out whether they had opportunities to develop autonomy and oral skills. The aim of the paper is twofold: first, to describe the course of action designed for this context, drawing from literature on learner autonomy (Benson, 2000, 2011; Dam, 2000; Kohonen, 1992; Little, 1996; 1997; Murray, 2014) and social learning spaces (Allhouse, 2015; Heigham, 2011; Murray, 2014); and second, to discuss the development and preliminary results of this process.

Building Language Skills and Social Networks in an Advanced Conversation Club: English Practice in Lecce

“…A longstanding member recently expressed to me his opinion that EPiL succeeds by helping learners build the confidence they need to use English for purposes that they themselves find interesting, not just to execute grammar exercises correctly: "They keep learning without [the act of learning itself] being the main focus ...." That remark is reminiscent of the findings of Sprenger and Guerra Ramos (2018), who noted that members of the social learning language space that they had studied in Brazil had indicated their "attendance [was] due mainly to opportunities to meet and exchange ideas with more experienced peers" (p. 375). Indeed, by adhering to proven effective strategies and working to identify new ones, EPiL has earned a reputation as a space where second language speakers markedly improve their English in a nonintensive learning environment.…”