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108 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas
Social Mediation amongst Language Teachers when Solving
Classroom Problems
Ma. de Lourdes Rico Cruz
Delphine Pluvinet
Rosa María Guevara Díaz de León
Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
Key words: group work, language teachers, problem solving, social mediation.
One of the most widely studied areas in education has been the phenomena arisen from group work
and interactions among participants when solving problems. According to scholars in the field, an
individual can accomplish more when working in collaboration with others than without them. This
implies group work where participants make an effort to share experience, facts, ideas and explana-
tions.
When group work occurs, the members are expected to collaborate with each other, to work in joint
coordination to achieve their shared goals. This usually works when considering a group of language
students under the surveillance of a teacher, especially when they find a common purpose to share
something. However, this seems more complex when it comes to observe teachers working and in-
teracting in groups. This makes us inquire about how group works with language teachers when they
are speaking about the problems they face in their language classrooms.
This study attempts to find what kind of problems the language teachers face in their classes and
the kind of strategies they use to solve them. One of the main issues of interest is to know how they
mediate each other when they are discussing about these experiences. These teachers are expected
to elaborate complex cognitive skills as well as some functions in the development of metacognitive
and teaching strategies might be forced given the context of the study. For instance, negotiation mi-
ght occur in the groups so that they decide how to organize their work, and what will be needed to
find is whether they use any other kind of mediation besides the one obtained by their colleagues. In
some way, this presentation attempts to present partial results of a research where a group of three
language teachers are exposed to the open discussion of problems they have faced in their class-
room and their reflection on how they have solved such situations.