COOPERATIVE LANGUAGE LEARNING
# An approach to teaching that makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in the class.
# Exchange of information between learners.
# Not only the learner learns but also is motivated to increase the learning of others.
# Peer-tutoring and peer-monitoring in the past of education like ‘John Dewey’ .
# Traditional teaching fosters competition rather than cooperation. It fovors whom. What about less succesful students ?
# Cooperative learning seeks to do :
· Raise the achievement of all students, including those who are gifted or academically handicapped.
· Help the teacher built positive relationships among students.
· Give students the experiences they need for healthy social, psychological and cognitive development.
· Not competition but team-based high performance structure.
# Cooperative L L is seen as the extention of the principles of Communicative LT .
# The goals in language teaching are :
· To provide opportunities for naturalistic second language acquisition with the use of interactive pair and group activities.
· To provide teachers with a methodology to enable them to achieve this goal and one that can be applied in a variety of curriculum settings.
· To enable focesed attention to particular lexical items, language structures, and communicative functions through the use of interactive tasks.
· To provide opportunities for learners to develop successful learning and communication strategies.
· To enhance learners motivation and reduce learner stress and to create a positive affective classroom climate.
APPROACH
Premise 1 : Mirrors the title of a book, Born To Talk : All normal children grow up in a normal environment learn to talk. We are born to talk, programmed to talk. Communication is the primary purpose of language.
Premise 2 : Most talkspeech is organized as conversation. Human beings spend a large part of their lives engaging in conversation and for most of them conversation is among their most significant and engrossing activities.
Premise 3 : Conversation operates according to a certain agreed-upon set of cooperative rules or ‘maxims’.
# Maxim of quality : truth
· Don’t say what you believe to be false.
· Don’t say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
# Maxim of quantity : information
· Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of exchange.
· Don’t make your contribution more informative than is required.
# Maxim of relation : relevance
· Be relevant.
# Maxim of manner : clarity
· Avoid obscurity of expression.
· Avoid ambiguity.
· Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)
· Be orderly.
Premise 4 : One learns how these cooperative maxims are realized in one’s native language through casual, everyday conversational interaction.
Premise 5 : How the maxims are realized in a second language through participation in cooperatively structured interactional activities.
THEORY OF LEARNING
# Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.
# Both of them stress the central role of social interaction in learning.
# CLL seeks to develop learners’ critical thinking skills.
# Question Matrix, Wiederhold : questions are believed to foster the development of critical thinking.
# Six learning advantages for ESL students in CLL class :
1. increased frequency and variety of second language practice through different types of interaction.
2. possibility for development or use of language in ways that support cognitive development and increased language skills.
3. opportunities to integrate language with content-based instruction.
4. opportunities to include a greater variety of curricular materials to simulate language as well as concept learning.
5. freedom for teachers to master new professional skills, particularly those emphasizing communication.
6. opportunities for students to act as resources for each other, thus assuming a more active role in their learning.
TYPES OF LEARNING AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES
# Johnson describes three types of cooperative learning groups :
1. Formal cooperative learning groups : These last from one class period to several weeks. These are establishes for a specific task and involve students working together to achieve shared learning goals.
2. Informal cooperative learning groups : These are ad-hoc groups that last from a few minutes to a class period and are used to focus student attention or to facilitate learning during direct teaching.
3. Cooperative base groups : These are long term, lasting for at least a year and consist of heterogenous learning groups with stable membership whose primary purpose is to allow members to give each other the support, help, encouragement, and assistance they need to succeed acadamically.
# Olsen and Kagan propose the following key elements of successful group-based learning in CL :
1. positive interdependence occurs when groups members feel that what helps one member helps all and what hurts one member hurts all. It is created by the structure of CL tasks and by building a spirit of mutual support within the group.
2. group formation is an important factor in creating positive interdependence.
Factors involved in setting up group include :
*deciding on the size of the group
*assigning students to group
*student roles in groups.
3. individual accountability involves both both group and individual performance.
4. social skills determine the way students interact with each other as teammates. Usually some explicit instruction in social skills is needed to ensure successful interaction.
5. structuring and structures refers to ways of organizing students interaction and different ways students are to interact such as Tree-step interview or Round Robin.
# Coelho describes three major kinds of cooperative learning tasks and their learning focus, each of which has many variations :
· team practice from common input-skills development and mastery of facts.
· Jigsaw : differentiated but predetermined input-evaluation and synthesis of facts and opinions.
· Cooperative projects : topicsresources selected by students ‘ discovery learning.
# Olsen and Kagan describe the following examples of CLL activities:
** three step interview :
· Students are in pairs ; one is interviewer and the other is interviewee.
· Students reverse roles.
· Each shares with team member what was learned during the two interviews.
** round table : there is one piece of paper and one pen for each team.
· One student makes a contribution and
· Passes the paper and pen to the student of hisher left.
· Each student makes contributions in turn. If done orally, the structure is called Round Robin.
LEARNER ROLES
# The primary role : a member of a group must work collaboratively on tasks with other group members.
# Tutors, checkers, recorders, and information shares.
TEACHER ROLES
# To create a highly structured and well organized learning environment.
# Setting goals, planning, and structuring tasks, establishing the physical arrangements of the classroom, assigning students to groups and roles, and selecting materials and time.
# Facilitator of learning.
# To provide broad questions to challenge thinking.
# To prepare students for the tasks.
# To assist students with the learning tasks.
# To give few commands, imposing less disciplinary control.
THE ROLE OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS
# Creating opportunities for students to work cooperatively.
# Materials may be specially designed for CLL learning.
# They may be modified from existing materials or borrowed from other disciplines.
CONCLUSION
# The use of discussion groups, group work, and pair work has often been advocated both in teaching languages and in other subjects.
# Typically, such groups are used to provide a chance from the normal pace of classroom events and to increase the amount of student participation in lessons.
# Such activities are not necessarily cooperative.
# In cooperative learning, group avtivities are the major mode of learning and are part of a comprehensive theory and system for the use of group work in teaching.
# Group activities are carefully planned to maximise students’ interaction and to faciitate students’ contributions to each other’s learning.
# CLL activities can also be used in collaboration with other teaching methods and approaches.
