ABSTRACT
T He experiment here reported began as a study of a method; before long it had developed into the far more interesting social study of two groups of children as they appeared in the day-to-day and week-to-week situation of the English lesson. It became evident as time went on that inter-personal relations played an important part in that situation, and that the teaching and learning processes were affected not only by the attitudes of pupils and teacher to their work, but also by the attitudes of the pupils to one another and of the class and the teacher to one another. It was possible to study the attitudes of the children to the particular kind of work under consideration (English Composition) in two ways: by the use of a scientifically constructed attitude test at the beginning and end of the experiment and by the use of observational techniques during the experimental period. These observations, combined with sociometric tests given at the beginning and end of the experiment and at intervals in the course of it, also made possible a continuous record of their changing attitudes to one another. In this way, the children were being studied not merely as learning machines registering (or not registering) certain impressions during formal lessons on vocabulary, sentence structure and the combination of ideas, but as personalities reacting spontaneously with one another in the effort to learn these techniques by using them co-operatively. In the informal situation of the group-work lesson, personal characteristics of individual children became more apparent to the investigator than they had ever been in the classroom. Any lesson conducted on traditional lines must by its nature be formal, even where friendly relations exist between teacher and pupils: it is necessary in the classroom situation that only one person speak at a time, and therefore that a child who wishes to ask or answer a question or to make a suggestion or comment first indicates by some conventional sign that she wishes to speak; for excessively shy, inhibited children this preliminary business of attracting attention must be an insuperable bar to participation in a discussion. There was evidence in the present experiment that in the group situation many such children, who rarely if ever took part in classroom lessons, were natural and un-intimidated when they worked in small groups with others whom they liked, and that some of them gradually came to participate actively even in the more formal lessons when the class worked as one large unit.
