Ayele Kebede

Efl Students' Perceptions of Group Work: High and Low Achievers in Focus Ayele Kebede

The main purpose of this study is to investigate how high and low achieving students perceive group work and to see if there are differences in perceptions between the two groups. The findings of the study indicate that both high and low achieving students have favorable perceptions about the advantages of group work, most aspects of organization of group work, the teacher roles and post-group work feedback. However, they have unfavorable perceptions towards most of the drawbacks of group work, marking group work activities, grouping based on achievements and students? interest, error correction, an emphasis given to the time rather than the purpose of group work and an emphasis given to the contents of group work during post-group work feedback. The t-test result indicate that there are differences in perceptions between high and low achievers only on the area of homogenous grouping based on gender, the use of mother tongue in group discussion and the domination of few active students over other members of a group. In this part high achievers have favorable perceptions. In short,the study shows that there is no uniformity in students' perception across different aspects of group work