Investigating the Role of Peer Work Interaction in Developing Students’ Oral Proficiency. The Case of Second Year LMD Students at the English Language Division in Mohamed Khider University of Biskra

Abstract

This work aims at exploring the role of peer work interaction in enhancing students’ oral proficiency. The problem highlighted is that most EFL classes witness the assumption that the instruction is often seen to be in one direction; that is teachers spend most of their time speaking while the students listen without talking and interacting. This is a harmful problem if our teachers keep teaching with that method of teaching. It is hypothesized that if students work in groups, their communicative abilities would develop. The aim of this investigation is to enable EFL learners to practice and reach the proficiency of the language. It also provides students with some techniques and communicative abilities in order to improve their speaking and listening skill. In this case, teachers would seek the best methods and the useful techniques to teach them how to interact with each other using communication to reach high language proficiency. And since the aim of second language learners is to communicate in a foreign language they should understand that speaking and listening skills are the main skills to develop their communicative abilities. Through two questionnaires distributed to second year students and teachers at the department of English, university of Biskra, we intend to see their opinions about working in groups and to which degree they like to know more about the language. The results of the study indicate that most teachers argue that peer work interaction is an effective technique that provides students with much more opportunities to improve their communicative abilities. On the other hand, the results illustrate that most of the learners prefer to work cooperatively to reach the proficiency of the language