Abstract:

By 2022, most educational institutions have reopened their doors to welcome students back into their classrooms; school yards and university campuses have been filled with movement, laughter, sounds and colours. This ‘back-to-normal’ experience does not mean, however, that we go back to life before the pandemic. There is no such thing. The pandemic has given teachers and students opportunities to explore and seize new learning experiences; it has, nonetheless, taken its toll as well. The impact and extend of that toll will shape and shake our world in years to come.

The small-scale research project has been built on an action-research construct, which focuses on the learning experience of 50 ESL freshmen students at a Chilean university. Participant’s level of English, as assessed by Cambridge Placement Test, corresponds to A1-B2, which meant they joined a beginners’ English course at the start of their school year. By the end of a 4-month instruction period, a survey was conducted to explore students’ perceptions on their oral performance. The analysis of the results indicates that students’ Willingness to Communicate (WTC) is being affected by an array of emotional barriers and a deep-rooted belief that they need morphosyntax knowledge and native-like pronunciation in order to produce any coherent or accurate stretch of language in the L2. These first results show that, despite being exposed to a communicative language teaching approach at university, the majority of the students are experiencing a rather extended silent period.

In order to both break a tendency towards stagnation, fed by low self-esteem and lack of speaking practice in their online lessons, as much as provide students with engaging communicative experiences, we are proposing to implement a selection of Kagan’s cooperative structures into the instructional design of a follow-up course. The selected cooperative strategies will be applied throughout the term along with formative and summative assessments. There is a twofold objective in this project: on the one hand, to assess and contrast students’ self-perception of their oral performance and, on the other hand, to help them reach a strong foothold at a B1 level in oral proficiency.

In this paper, we will share the instruments designed for the project, the data analysis and the preliminary results of the instructional strategies.

Keywords:

Kagan cooperative structures, Willingness to Communicate, proficiency, silent period.