Cooperative learning: principles and practice

TEFLIN Teacher Development Series, 2018

This downloadable 80-page book explains principles and practices related to the use of cooperative learning in language teaching. Cooperative learning is a student-centered pedagogy that seeks to alter the power balance in the classroom, and by so doing encourage students to be active citizens during and after their days in the traditional classroom.

Anatolian Journal of Education, 2021

This study aimed to investigate teachers' perceptions and practices of cooperative learning (CL) in English language classrooms. It was conducted with the participation of 46 teachers (34 females and 12 males) from 10 schools (7 senior and 3 junior secondary schools) in a city in the Mekong delta-Vietnam. All the participants had used CL in their classroom at least two year before they participated in the study. To find out teachers' perceptions of CL in English language classrooms, the study used questionnaires and interviews. The questionnaire consisting of 50 items was designed based on Likert scale aiming at collecting data about their perceptions and practices to promote CL in their classrooms. The interviews with six of the participants were conducted to obtain more insightful understanding of cooperative learning and how they practiced promoting cooperative learning and difficulties they had when they applied it in their classrooms. The results show that most of the investigated teachers had positive perceptions of applying cooperative learning, especially they had good understanding of it (M=4.3, SD=.479). Regarding difficulties the teachers had, the results showed that the big class size, the noise and class control losing were claimed to be regular barriers. Besides, they also offered some ways to promote cooperative learning in English classrooms including clearly assigning roles for students, setting the stage for learning and closely monitoring the groups.

Ursu Mariana, 2019

This reasearch is about the efficiency of using cooperative learning in teaching the English reading and the students’ attitude towards cooperative learning.

Cooperative learning and collaborative learning are two of the central approaches that utilize pair or group activities in the language learning classroom. However, despite the fact that these approaches have been developed under different historical backgrounds and thus have different pedagogical aims to be pursued, a tendency to use the two terms interchangeably has obscured their respective merits in foreign language education. This paper therefore attempts to differentiate them through an extensive review of the relevant literature. It reveals that cooperative learning, which emphasizes the necessity of developing learners’ social skills, tends to be described as a more structured and teacher-centered approach than collaborative learning, which presupposes the learners’ autonomy to a greater extent. This paper, rather than arguing any primacy of one of the two approaches, introduces some issues to assist practitioners and researchers to identify which approach would be most beneficial for their individual teaching and research goals.

In this workshop, the presenters will first describe the principles of Collaborative Learning as expressed in Jacobs et al. (2002): "Simultaneous Interaction," "Equal Participation," "Individual Accountability," and "Positive Interdependence." Learners benefit from working together because each individual member has specific roles and responsibilities during the group effort. The process of learning becomes more meaningful for learners because of the act of discussing and sharing information, and giving and receiving opinions. Through the process of peer scaffolding students can reach higher levels of competency that are unattainable alone. The participants will demonstrate CL activities from their university-level English classes and share student reactions to these activities. Workshop participants will then have the opportunity to experience such CL activities as cooperative shadowing, cooperative creative writing, and cooperative dialogue ...

AA Ibrahim, 2022

This paper focuses on the relevance of the cooperative learning approach. The approach in the foreign language classroom is believed to increase language use, improve communicative skills, build confidence and stimulate learner autonomy. It also looked at the meaning of cooperative learning seen as a communal activity in which learning is carried out through the mutual exchange of information. Within the framework, group members are responsible for their own construction of knowledge as well as for facilitating the learning of the group members, strategies for cooperative learning, principles through creating conditions for language learning and knowledge of the learners, advantage cooperative learning in allowing interdependency and cooperation within the group giving opportunities to group member to accept the ideas and thought of other group members and disadvantages not all students may participate equally in collaborative activities, with the more serious students shouldering the responsibilities for the assigned task., disadvantages; It expensive in that learning environment that will allow positive interdependence and cooperation is needed in cooperative learning as well recommendation Teachers must be properly trained in the field of cooperative learning as well as Remediate package by making teachers in cooperative learning to be properly guided to serve as a pivot to students in organizing and formulating objective though the approach is learnercentred. A conclusion is also drawn.

The author has been teaching English language to college students for the past 18 years. The main focus of my teaching is imparting Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing skills to the students. Teaching English in an ESL context has been an enriching experience as it enables the teacher to expose the students to the nuances of language learning.

This study examines the effectiveness of cooperative learning (CL) in developing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' grammatical competence in a relatively under-researched context (i.e., Saudi Arabia) and accounts for this effectiveness with reference to students' behaviours, verbal interactions, and their perceptions about learning English lessons in a CL environment. To identify the effect of CL in comparison to traditional small groups on EFL learners' achievements, behaviour states, and verbal interactions, a twelve week study was conducted in four government secondary schools in an EFL context. The participants in this study were 139 male students in the tenth grade, aged 14 to 15 years, in four boys' secondary schools in Al-Baha City, Saudi Arabia. Each school was randomly assigned to one of two conditions, either an experimental or a control group. The researcher videotaped eight EFL classes over a twelve week period: four classes under experimental conditions who are trained in CL principles and skills, and four classes in the comparison groups without this training.