Cooperative Language Learning

Cooperative Language Learning

1. Cooperative Language Learning (CLL) is part of a more general instructional approach also known as Collaborative Learning (CL).

   • Cooperative Learning is an approach to teaching that makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in the classroom.
     • Cooperative Learning has antecedents in proposals for peer-tutoring and peer-monitoring that go back hundreds of years and longer.
       • In second language teaching, CL has been embraced as a way of promoting communicative interaction in the classroom and is seen as an extension of the principles of Communicative Language Teaching.
         • It is viewed as a learner-centered approach to teaching held to offer advantages over teacher-fronted classroom methods. In language teaching its goals are:
           • – To provide opportunities for naturalistic second language acquisition through 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 focused 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 learner motivation and reduce learner stress and to create a positive affective classroom climate CLL is thus an approach that crosses both mainstream education and second and foreign language teaching.

2. Approach

   • Cooperative Language Learning is founded on some basic premises about the interactive/cooperative nature of language and language learning and builds on these premises in several ways.
     • Premise 1
       • All normal children growing up in a normal environment learn to talk
       • Premise 2
         • “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
           • Is that conversation operates according to a certain agreedupon set of cooperative rules or “maxims”
           • Premise 4
             • Is that one learns how these cooperative maxims are realized in one’s native language through casual, everyday conversational interaction.
             • Premise 5
               • Is that one learns how the maxims are realized in a second language through participation in cooperatively structured interactional activities.

3. Design

   • Objectives
     • Since CLL is an approach designed to foster cooperation rather than competition, to develop critical thinking skills, and to develop communicative competence through socially structured interaction activities, these can be regarded as the overall objectives of CLL.

4. Types of learning and teaching activities

   • 1. Formal cooperative learning groups.
     • 2. Informal cooperative learning groups.
       • 3. Cooperative base groups.

5. Learner roles

   • The primary role of the learner is as a member of a group who must work collaboratively on tasks with other group members. Learners have to learn teamwork skills.

6. Teacher roles

   • The teacher has to create a highly structured and well-organized learning environment in the classroom, setting goals, planning and structuring tasks, establishing the physical arrangement of the classroom, assigning students to groups and roles, and selecting materials and time

7. Procedure

   • Johnson et al. (1994: 67–68) give the following example of how a collaborative learning lesson would be carried out when students are required to write an essay, report, poem, or story, or review something that they have read.
     • A cooperative writing and editing pair arrangement is used. Pairs verify that each member’s composition matches the criteria that have been established by the teacher; they then receive an individual score on the quality of their compositions

8. Conclusions

   • In Cooperative Learning, group activities are the major mode of learning and are part of a comprehensive theory and system for the use of group work in teaching.

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