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1. The Effect of Pair Work on Guessing the
Meaning of Unknown Words in an EFL Context
Sasan Baleghizadeh
Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
sasanbaleghizadeh@yahoo.com
3rd ICASS
November
2014

2. Advantages of Pair Work
Harmer (2007) lists the advantages of pair work as follows:
• It dramatically increases the amount of speaking time each
individual gets in class.
• It allows students to work and interact independently
without the necessary guidance of the teacher, thus
promoting learner autonomy.
• It recognizes the old maxim that ‘two heads are better than
one’, thereby allowing students to share responsibility rather
than having to bear the whole weight themselves.
• It is relatively quick and easy to organize.

3. The teacher is no longer in control of the class (Brown,
2001).
Students will use their native language (Brown, 2001;
Carless, 2008).
Learners will be deprived of receiving “superior data”
(Prabhu, 1987).
Some learners find it discouraging to work in pairs and
groups and prefer to work individually (Harmer, 2007).

4. Cooperative Learning Theory
Pair work is a good vehicle for implementation of cooperative learning, as
opposed to competitive or individualistic modes of learning.
To be considered cooperative, the group members should observe the
following:
Positive interdependence, in which all group members participate to
achieve a shared goal;
Individual accountability, in which each member of the group is held
responsible for his or her own learning, which in turn contributes to the
group goal;
Cooperation, in which students discuss, problem-solve, and collaborate
together;
Evaluation, in which members of the group review and evaluate their
ability to work together effectively and to make changes as needed.
(Johnson & Johnson, 1991)

5. Task typeYearStudies
Cloze exercise, text reconstruction, short composition1999Storch
Dictogloss2002Kuiken & Vedder
Text-editing task2007Storch
Conversational cloze2009Baleghizadeh
Text-editing task2010aBaleghizadeh
Word-building task2010bBaleghizadeh
In recent years, there have been a number of studies that
have examined the effect of pair work on form-focused activities:
There have been very few studies, if any, that have explored the
effect of pair work on guessing the meaning of unknown words
from context.

6. Does pair work improve the performance of EFL learners on guessing the
meaning of unknown words compared to when they do the same task
individually?
47 Iranian EFL students (27 females and 20 males) with an average
age of 25 participated in the study. They formed an experimental (n=30) and a
comparison group (n=17).
Two reading passages each followed by 10 vocabulary questions.
The participants in the comparison group did the task individually, while the
participants in the experimental group did it in pairs following the Think-Pair-
Share cooperative structure. The average time on task for the comparison
group was 15 minutes and for the experimental group was 20 minutes.
Research question
Participants
Materials
Procedure

7. Groups n M SD t df sig
Experimental 15 13.15 1.24 5.20 31 0.001
Comparison 17 10.06 1.56

8. 1. Promotive interaction driven by having a shared goal.
When two learners are asked to produce one single copy of
a given task, they pool their joint efforts to do something
better than what they would have been able to do
individually.
2. Time factor. Overall, the learners in the experimental
group were longer on task than their counterparts in the
comparison group.
The better performance of the learners in the experimental
group could be attributed to 2 reasons:

9. Hotels were among the earliest facilities that bound the United States
together. They were both creatures and creators of communities, as well
symptoms of the frenetic quest for community. Even in the first part of the
nineteenth century, Americans were already forming the habit of gathering
from all corners of the nation for both public and private, business and
pleasure, purposes.
What does the word “bound” in line 1 mean?
(A) led
(B) protected
(C) tied
(D) strengthened

10. Tasks of this type, when done cooperatively,
provide learners with ample opportunity to
negotiate for meaning.
Such tasks maximize the amount of time on task.
The learners in the present study found the given
task, particularly in the cooperative mode, highly
motivating: They unanimously asked their teacher
to give them more opportunities for pair work.