Abstract/Summary

Group work for formative and summative purposes has increasingly been built into the curricula of higher education institutions, as the number of both home and international students has grown. There are sound pedagogical reasons for including group work assignments, but successful outcomes are dependent on group dynamics and synergies, effective communication skills and, fundamentally, linguistic interactions (Murray, 2016). The research reported on here explored how students work together in multilingual groups and how they communicate using social media sites and apps. Questions focused on what languages were being used to communicate, what group members saw as the challenges and the benefits of working in multilingual groups and what differences existed in the perceptions of the international and home student in terms of working together. The data was collected through interviews carried out in 2017 and 2018. What emerged was a complex picture of how students perceived the role of language in their interactions as a group, but a clearer understanding of how social media are used in the group interactions as students were working on their assignments.