Teachers must find ways of engaging students in their lessons, encourage active participation
and use strategies that enable the class to function as a cohesive group, to deal with these they
can learn much from considering approaches that have been used in mainstream education.
Cooperative/Collaborative language learning originated in mainstream education and it
emphasizes peer support and coaching, it makes maximum use of cooperative activities
involving pairs and small groups of learners in the classroom; learning is dependent on the
socially structured exchange of information between learners in group, each learner is in
charge of his/her own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others at the same
time.
In second language teaching it is seen as a way of promoting communicative interaction in the
classroom and as an extension of the principles of communicative language teaching. It is
learner centered and an approach to teaching that is held to offer advantages over teacher
fronted classroom methods.
Language teaching goals:
- Provide opportunities for naturalistic SLA through the use of interactive pair and group
activities.
- Provide teachers with a methodology to enable them to achieve this goal and one that
can be applied in a variety of curriculum settings.
- Enable focused attention to particular items, language structures and communicative
functions through interactive tasks.
- Provide opportunities for learners to develop successful learning and communication
strategies.
- Enhance learner motivation and reduce stress, positive affective classroom climate.
- Seeks to develop learner’s critical thinking skills, which are seen as central to learning
of any sort.
- Seeks to develop classrooms that foster cooperation rather than competition in
learning.
Theory of language
o Language is a resource for expressing meaning (the goal is expressing meaning which is
done by a joint process of collaboration)
o Language is a means of expressing different communicative functions (communicative
competence depends on the ability to express and understand functions or speech
acts)
o Means of interpersonal and social interaction (spoken and written language means by
which interaction is achieved)
o Resource for carrying out tasks (focus on collaborating to complete different tasks)
Theory of learning
o Learning results from conversational interaction (assumption that learners seek to
achieve meaning by engaging in a joint process of negotiation of meaning in which
many communication strategies are used to maintain the flow of communication. Ex:
repetition, confirmation, reformulation, comprehension check, clarification request)
o Promotes interaction:
- More proficient students can facilitate comprehension of their less proficient peers.
- Teachers can encourage more negotiation for meaning by allowing groups to try to sort
out their own communication difficulties without teacher intervention.
- Activities provide context.
- Group activities can encourage students to interact with each other in a way that
promotes a focus on form (using grammar; noticing tasks in which students analyze
how a grammar point functions and formulate their own rule, peer assessment in
which they check each other’s writing or speaking for particular grammatical features)
o Language learning is a sociocultural process: Notions of the zone of proximal
development (ZPD) and scaffolding. Assistance from a more advanced learner,
collaborative dialogue, new knowledge or skill is the outcome of interaction.
Desing
To foster cooperation rather than competition to develop critical thinking skills and
communicative competence through structured interaction activities. More specific objectives
derive according to the context in which CLL is used.
The syllabus
CLL does not assume any particular form of language syllabus since activities from a wide
variety of curriculum orientations can be taught via this approach. CLL is used in teaching
content classes, ESP, the four skills, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. Systematic and
carefully planed use of group-based procedures in teaching and the way in which it promotes a
focus on critical and creative thinking.
Types of learning and teaching activities
o Formal CLL groups (one class to several weeks groups for a specific task, students
working together to achieve shared learning goals)
o Informal CLL groups (few minutes to a class period groups to focus student attention or
to facilitate learning during direct teaching)
o Cooperative base groups (long term, can last the whole year, heterogeneous learning
groups whose main purpose is to allow members to give each other support, help,
encouragement and assistance to succeed).
o Olsen and Kagan proposed key elements of successful group-based learning:
- Positive interdependence (every member feels what each one of them feels)
- Group formation (size, random, teacher or student selected, student roles)
- Individual accountability (group and individual performance)
- Social skills (the way in which they interact as teammates)
- Structuring and structures (ways of organizing student interaction)
o Activities:
- Three-step interview (one ins interviewer and the other interviewee, they reverse
roles)
- roundtable (single piece of paper and one pen per group, each student contributes and
passes the paper). Round robin (same but orally)
- think-pair-share (the teacher asks, students answer, discuss with a partner, and share
the partner’s response)
- Solve-pair-share (the teacher gives a problem; students work out solutions individually
and then explain how they solved it in interview or round robin structures.
- Numbered heads (students number off in teams, the teacher asks a question, students
put their heads together and everyone gets to know and explain the answer, the
teacher calls some of them)
Learner roles
o Work collaboratively on tasks with other group members.
o Directors of their own learning (plan, monitor, evaluate)
o Direct and active involvement and participation
Teacher roles
o Create a highly structured and well-organized learning environment (set goals, plan
and structure tasks, stable physical arrangement of the classroom, assign students to
groups and roles, select material and time)
o Facilitator of learning (move around the class helping students and groups)
o Speak less than in teacher-fronted classes (broad questions to challenge thinking,
prepare and assist students)
Materials Arranged according to purpose of lesson,
usually a group shares a complete set (of
materials)
Type of activities Any instructional activity, mainly group work
to engage learners in communication
(information sharing, negotiation of meaning
and interaction)
Interaction Intense interaction among students, few
teacher-students ones
Room arrangement Collaborative small groups
Student expectations Everyone contributes to success.
Progress=winner
Teacher-student relationship Cooperating and equal
Critics: its use with learner of different proficiency levels (some students may benefit more
than others) and the demands on teachers (may have difficulty adapting to the new roles
required).
