This article reports on 140 university-level Japanese L2 English learners’ perceived effect of friendship on the difficulty of pair work and speaking English, in addition to their perceived effectiveness and opinions towards friendship-building activities. The present study considers pair work to be part of the wide scope of Communicative Language Teaching, which includes interactive, collaborative activities between students in a language classroom. Deviating from traditional teacher-focused methods, the promotion of interaction between students is a common and successful practice in the language classroom. Nfor (2018) noted that the emphasis that Communicative Language Teaching places on interaction prepares Japanese students for real-life communication, secures their engagement, and yields perceived improvement. Shih (2020) added that collaborative learning promotes social interaction and helps develop learner autonomy among EFL university students. Furthermore, Communicative Language Teaching was found by Kurniawan (2022) to improve the pedagogic process, bring social skills for students, and develop teachers’ skills as managers of classroom interaction. The emphasis on pair work in Communicative Language Teaching has resulted in several benefits for language learners. Storch (2007) explained that pair work in the language classroom provides learners with opportunities to use a foreign language for a range of functions, leading to language learning. Sert (2005) highlighted the objectively noticeable benefits of pair work and noted that students engaged in pair work tended to produce more grammatically accurate output, indicating a higher level of awareness compared to individual activities. Pair work notably produces benefits for learners’ ability to speak a foreign language. Achmad and Yusuf (2014) showed that pair work interactions in an L2 English classroom can develop students’ speaking skills and expand their language resources. Mulya (2016) emphasized that pair work is especially efficient for the teaching of speaking, as it yields significant improvements for students’ speaking performances compared to teacher-centered techniques, which traditionally require more effort from the teacher. More recently, a study by Patawang (2022) found that pair work not only improves students’ speaking ability, but also increases their motivation for speaking.

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