The rotation of Seats in the Classroom and the Students’ Learning

The paper describes research done in two groups of Spanish language courses at a technical-oriented university. The aim of the research was to demonstrate the influence of a controlled rotation of seats on fluency and interaction during a thematic dialogue in a conversation class. The rotation of seats in a classroom is considered one of the aspects of cooperative learning. The rotation of seats is a classroom technique that allows that a teacher has a power and a competence to influence students’ performance in a class as well as final exam results. The investigation consisted in comparison of final exam conversation results in a class where students were asked to follow a certain seating arrangement (an experimental group) and in a group were they were allowed to sit as they chose to (a traditional group). The result was that students from the experimental group achieved better results in the final exam. The statistical theory and method of hypothesis testing was used for the analysis of quantitative data.