A study of group interaction patterns of overseas Malaysian students on British undergraduate programmes: framing of ideas

The thesis investigates the way ideas are developed and framed in group interaction tasks on British undergraduate programmes for Malaysian students. The introductory chapter of this thesis states the three major aims of the study - educational, linguistic and cross-cultural. The study aims to investigate the role of talk in constructing valuable educational knowledge in group discussion tasks, the role of language in mediating the process of generating ideas, and the way knowledge is constructed by students from different socio-cultural educational backgrounds and what this tells us about the socio-cultural view of knowledge students might have been socialised into. The thesis proceeds with a discussion of the methodological issues involved in data collection, analysis and description. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical parameters on which the study is grounded and the educational linguistic approach which is adopted in the study. Each of the three following chapters of the thesis addresses each of the aims of the study. The findings arising from the study are illustrated with reference to various group discussion tasks recorded and interview data. The thesis concludes with a review of the implications of the findings of the study for pedagogy and research