Group Dynamics: Facilitating a “Good Atmosphere”
in the Roll-On-Roll-Off Mixed-Nationality General English Classroom

Classroom Dynamics opens with:
“I didn’t mean to write this book.” (Hadfield, 1992, Pg 7)

I can sympathise. I didn’t mean to write this particular Statement of Relevance. In a way, this topic chose me.      

This topic came to me from Gary’s session on Classroom Management, and, perhaps more crucially, a Critical Incident I experienced in my classroom shortly before. In short, I started a brand-new mixed-nationality general English class and by the end of the class, a relaxed, friendly and conducive atmosphere for learning had somehow been created between these students who had never met before. I thought to myself: “What happened there?”

It’s impossible to say if I actually played any part myself in creating the positive atmosphere in the class as the concept of an atmosphere itself is “something so intangible and insubstantial” (Hadfield, 1992, Pg 3). However, I feel confident that I facilitated this atmosphere by focusing on just one simple thing: names.

Research has shown that knowing each other’s names can play an important role in motivation and learning (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003). In my class, during a get-to-know-you mingle, I taught my class the phrase “Sorry, what’s your name again?” to help them if they forgot each other’s names. Then, during group feedback, I allowed the students to nominate each other to give information to the class. This seemed to make a real, tangible difference to the dynamic in the classroom.

In my pre-session reading, I discovered I wasn’t the only one to have reflected upon ‘the feel’ of a classroom (Ehrman & Dörnyei, 1998; Dörnyei, 2001; Hadfield, 1992). Almost everything I read on ‘atmosphere’ had some form of the following the question in their introductions:
“Why do some classes feel ‘good’ and ‘bad’ at different times or all the time?” (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003, Pg 4)

Something Gary said in the session a few days later really stuck with me. To paraphrase:
“What about rapport? Rapport between teachers and students, rapport between students and students…”

I realised that I had previously only ever thought about my relationship with the students, and never about the relationships between the students themselves. This experience in my classroom and Gary’s session opened my eyes to something I hadn’t consciously considered before: group dynamics, “probably one of the most – if not the most – useful subdisciplines in the social sciences for language teachers… [yet] virtually unknown in second language (L2) research.” (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003, Pg 1)

It seemed incredibly pertinent for me to explore this area in more detail for a variety of reasons. Firstly, in how it relates to my current teacher beliefs and identity. I’ve always seen myself as a teacher who is quite distant from the learners. I’ve prided myself on my awareness of language and my ability to teach and I maintain a very professional relationship with my students. However, I had never even really thought about how various groups interact with each other, other than general and superficial thoughts such as “X is a good group,” or “Y isn’t.”

Informal research by Hadfield (1992) and my own discussions with my colleagues seem to show that atmosphere is a key element in facilitating learning and extremely important for both students and teachers. However, myself and other teachers I know often don’t see it as part of the job and feel, as Hadfield puts it, “the way the students in the class relate to each other is not the teacher’s business; the teacher’s business is to transmit content, and whether the class get on or not is irrelevant.” (Hadfield, 1992, Pg 10) However, now, I would argue (as would Hadfield (1992)) our responsibility in the classroom extends far beyond just this.  

Essentially, though, it’s out of my comfort zone, and, for my development as a teacher, it feels far more important to explore the unknown rather than something I was already familiar with (such as the lexical approach, which I had originally considered for my SOR).

Secondly, my context. I teach in a private language school to mixed-nationality (and co-operative learning (which is connected to group dynamics) is associated with benefits in “interethnic relations” (Jacobs & Hall, 2002, Pg 53) among others) roll-on-roll-off classes of a variety of ages. The atmosphere in a class can change drastically from week to week, as students are constantly joining or leaving the class (at the beginning/end of their course, or if they change the level they are studying). A lot of the reading I have done tends to give techniques for larger groups than I typically teach (Jacobs & Hall, 2002) or for groups which remain fixed for a set course/term (Hadfield, 1992; Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003) rather than the roll-on-roll-off ever-changing environment that I deal with. I feel that this is allows me a good opportunity to take some existing ideas and adapt them specifically to my context.

In order to further develop this new interest of mine, I have developed a few action points for me to focus on in the coming weeks and months.

• Try out more of the practical techniques found in my reading.
• Adapt these techniques so they suit my context better.
• Adapt some of my own existing classroom management techniques so they are more informed by what I have recently read.
• Develop some of my own original techniques with a particular focus on my context.
• Explore how to maintain good atmosphere in the class. While I’ve had some success with creating an initial positive atmosphere, how to maintain that in the roll-on-roll-off classrooms I work in needs further work – although, “very little attention has been paid to the process of maintaining groups after they have been formed.” (Hadfield, 1992, Pg 10)
• Explore how to change a ‘bad’ atmosphere into a more positive one. What I’ve read around this topic often deals solely with individual ‘problem’ students, (Lewis, 2002) but not so much explores the dynamic of a whole group or class.
• Develop a Teacher Development session on this topic to be delivered at my school’s annual conference.

Reference List

• Hadfield, J. 1992. Classroom dynamics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dörnyei, Z. & Murphey, T. 2003. Group dynamics in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Jacobs, G. M. & Hall, S. 2002. Implementing Co-operative Learning in Richards, J.C. & Renandya, W.A. (eds). Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dörnyei, Z. 2001. Motivational strategies in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ehrman, M. & Dörnyei, Z. 1998. Interpersonal dynamics in second language education: The visible and invisible classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Lewis, M. 2002. Classroom Management in Richards, J.C. & Renandya, W.A. (eds). Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.