RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN MULTILINGUAL GROUPS WORKING ON ACADEMIC GROUP ASSIGNMENTS
INTRODUCTION
This small-scale study is an initial exploration of students’ perceptions and experience of working in groups at a UK university. The complexity of the dynamics of group work and the many variables impacting on interactions make this a rich, but challenging, area to research. The dynamics are even more complex when groups are multilingual and multicultural. The intention of the study was to gain a better understanding of how students were working together in such groups, focusing in particular on the impacts of their using both English and their first languages and how their collaborative working was impacted by the use of social media.
BACKGROUND
The research was carried out in two stages in 2017 and 2018 and is a qualitative study based on interviews with a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate students drawn from a range of academic departments. In the first set of interviews, the focus was on how students interacted using social media and what language they were using; the focus at the second stage was more detailed exploration of the ways in which language was being used in group interactions both face-to-face and using social media. A further dimension to the research was that a significant proportion of the work was undertaken by a student researcher funded by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme, a scheme that has been in place at the university since 2006 designed to develop
