2021 年 24 巻 1 号 p. 31-45
The objective of this study is to uncover the process of how EFL Japanese university students of intermediate or higher proficiency fail to engage in collaborative dialogue in a group project. When students work on a content-based group project, they are not only required to attend to the target language use, but also to the content of the project. In this study, the author qualitatively analyzed students’ interview data to explain how their feelings and thoughts affected the way they interacted with their peers, and how such interactions led to their failed attempts of collaborative dialogue. The findings suggest that the difficulties in simultaneously managing the contents and the process of the project using their L2 negatively affected students’ motivation for engagement, thus resulting in failure to engage in collaborative dialogue. The study also revealed that students found their L1 as a useful tool to deal with those challenges.
