A Study of the Impact of Group Work on Students’ Ability to Understand the Content of Listening Material

The purpose of this study is to consider the effect of group work on students’ ability to understand listening material (such as movie dialog), in an English class. In contrast to speaking classes, where group work is very often used as a form of conversation practice, students in listening classes rarely work in groups. Many commonly used listening textbooks present interesting learning activities, but no group activities. This study introduced a group activity involving a movie into a listening class and considered its effect on the students’ ability to understand listening material. For one semester, students took part in the following three group activities using the film, Jerry Maguire: a summary of the story content, a relay speed game, and the challenge of reordering a long conversation. A control group used a normal English listening approach to learn same material. Two tests were carried out on the results; these showed that group work had a positive effect on the students’ ability to understand English content. In an open-ended questionnaire conducted at the end of the class, students expressed very high levels of satisfaction with the group activities, and said that they found English listening much easier and more interesting through group work.