The effect of pair work on a word building task and on a grammar exercise

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to investigate the effect of pair work on a word-building task and on a grammar exercise in four EFL classes (two groups of 1st of Bachillerato/11th grade and two others of 3rd of ESO/9th grade). Sixty-nine Spanish students took part in this classroom based study. All the participants completed -individually and in pairs- two isomorphic versions of two types of task: a word-building task and a grammar activity. Results of the data analysis showed that the participants did not achieve significantly higher scores on the given tasks working in pairs than individually. This indicates that collaborative work does not always imply an improvement neither in grammatical accuracy nor in morphological knowledge.