Friendship group activities, as one of the learner-centered applications of collaborative learning, promotes learners' overall abilities and have been warmly welcomed into English as a foreign language (EFL) classes in China. However, because of the complexity of the multi-level classroom life, sometimes this application becomes problematic in the actual practice. To tackle this problem and illustrate the dynamic characteristics of collaborative language learning, further investigation into friendship groups from the students' perspective is necessary. The present study was conducted through qualitative research with six semi-structured interviews, which aimed to elicit learners' in-depth views on group work in the actual language classrooms and create a more suitable facilitative classroom environment for future students. The findings show that the fundamental factors, such as culture, teacher guidance and group processing have significantly impacted students' performance and participation. This impact may have important implications for implementing collaborative language learning in future EFL contexts.