How collaborative is pair work? ESL tertiary students composing in pairs

A common teaching strategy in the language classroom is to assign students to work on a task in pairs or small groups. Research on group/pair has shown that such classroom organization promotes speaking practice and negotiations of meaning. However, most of the studies on pair work to date have focused on factors affecting the quantity of certain types of negotiation moves. Very few studies have investigated the nature of group or pair interactions; that is, whether they are collaborative or not. Moreover, very few studies have utilized tasks which require students to produce a written text in pairs. The study reported in this paper investigated the performance of three pairs of adult ESL students on a writing task assigned in class. The main source of data was transcripts of the pair talk. Other sources of data included the researcher’s observation notes and the written text the pairs produced. Data were analysed for salient features of student interactions and characteristics of collaborative pair work were identified. Results show that students working in pairs may not necessarily work in a collaborative manner, but where they do collaborate this may have an effect on task performance.