These different expectations about the involvement of the teacher in speaking activities relate to the view that people who have trouble in speaking experience greater difficulties in foreign-language classes where their performance is monitored by the teacher (Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope 1986). According to Dickinson (1987, 8), this is related to ‘self-instruction’, which is defined as ‘situations in which learners are working without the direct control of the teacher’. Dickinson sees self-instruction as a possible way of overcoming some affective factors that delay language learning and it seems to be needed more by anxious students.
On the other hand, some students expected the teacher to be involved. Williams and Burden (1997) raise this issue when questioning the involvement of significant others in the language learning process: teachers not only influence learners’ personal feelings but also their engagement in an activity through providing positive or negative feedback. This shows the inverse connection between anxiety and teacher involvement: when students can control their anxiety, they may feel more comfortable with carrying out the activity with the teacher.
The structure of group work. Group work activities were favoured by most students because they were useful in meeting students’ wishes to practise spoken language. Most of the students agreed with R28, who stated: ‘Thanks to the group work activity, I found the opportunity to speak’. However, the number of students in a group was a crucial factor. In Intervention 5, for example, students worked in groups of six or seven and this was one of the least successful activities. The stated reason was because students mostly spoke in Turkish, one of the drawbacks of group work (Ur 1996). When asked about the reasons why they communicated in Turkish, they stated that the high number of students in group work hindered self-control: ‘In group work activities, in any case, one starts speaking in Turkish and after that everybody does the same’ (F2).
M3 highlighted the problems of group work activities and argued that he did not want to contribute in this type of activities: