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partners to maintain the communication. 
Furthermore, the ratio of appropriate conversational distance was seven against 

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13 for the control and experimental groups, as shown in Table 4.14. That is to say, 
only seven pairs in the control group stood within 60 to 90 centimeters, but there were 
13 pairs in the experimental group that did so. The most likely explanation could be 
that the students in the control group did not feel as comfortable talking to their 
partners as those in the experimental group. Therefore, the control group tended to 
keep farther distance than the experimental group.
The sense of appropriate talking distance might have gradually developed when 
the students in the experimental group were endowed with the opportunities to 
perform the group dialogues in the Inside-Outside Circle for about twelve times 
during the time span of the experiment. Usually after the students had mastered the 
dialogue from the textbook with their talk pairs in their own groups, Ms. Lee would 
ask about 12 or 18 students to the front to form an Inside-Outside Circle to perform 
the group dialogue without looking at their books. The pairs facing each other from 
the inside or the outside circle had to either talk from their memory or recreate their 
lines, if they forgot their own. After they finished the dialogue once, they moved 
one step to the right or to the left to face a new partner, depending on Ms. Lee’s 
instruction. Each time they faced a new partner, they had to adjust the standing 
distance with the persons facing them. Ms. Lee would slightly push the pairs closer 
if she found them standing too far away from each other. From the group 
role-playing through the Inside-Outside Circle, the participants were exposed to 
frequent face-to-face interactions not only with their original conversation pairs, but 
also partners from other groups. Therefore, when they performed the oral task, the 
experimental group tended to naturally display the non-verbal aspects that they might 
have acquired from the frequent encounter of peer interaction.
Moreover, whenever the students faced new partners in the Inside-Outside Circle, 
they had to adjust not only the standing distance, but also the cooperative skills to 

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complete their task. Maybe that was why most students in the experimental group 
displayed more cooperative skills and efforts to maintain the communication, like 
reminding their partners, smiling to encourage, and being able to apologize when 
silence inevitably occurred. 
In addition, the findings of the strategic competence identified in this study 
realized Wesche’s (1985) criteria of performance test. According to Wesche (1985), 
the criteria used to evaluate oral performance should include adequate fulfillment of 
the task. The experimental group displayed better skills to fulfill their task than the 
control group. From the experimental group’s reactions to communication 
breakdown, as shown in Table 4.12, it was obvious to observe that the cooperative 
learners, compared to the ones in the control group, tended to encourage the success 
of others and displayed more persistence in completing the tasks. Facing 
uncomfortable silence, only one out of eight students finally dropped the task in the 
experimental group, while six out of ten in the control group gave up the task. The 
persistence in completing the task might have stemmed from the notion of sink or 
swim together and all for one and one for all, which was prevalent in another 
cooperative method of Learning Together.
As discussed in detail in Chapter Three, the techniques used under Learning