Cooperative learning

COOPERATIVE LANGUAGE LEARNING
It’s also known as a general instructional approach as collaborative learning
It makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in the classroom
COOPERATIVE LEARNING
Promote communicative interaction in the classroom
Learner -centered approach
GOALS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
To provide opportunities for naturalistic second language acquisition through the use of interactive pair and group avtivities.
To provide teachers with a methodology to enable them to achieve this goal.
To enable focused attention to particular lexical items, language structures, and communicative functions through the use of interactive tasks.
To provide opportunitities 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.
TYPES OF LEARNING AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES
Formal cooperative learning groups
These last from one class period to several weeks
Involve students working together to avhieve shared learning goals
Informal Cooperative learning groups
These are ad-hoc groups that last from a few minutes to a class period.
To focus student attention or to facilitate learning during direct teaching
Cooperative Base Groups
These are long term, lasting for at least a year and consist of heterogeneous learning groups with stable membership
To allow members to give each other the support, help, encouragement, and assistance they need to succeed academically
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Positive Interdependence
Group Formation
Individual Accountability
Social Skills
Structuring and Structures
GROUP FORMATION
Deciding on the size of the group: this will depend on the tasks they have to carry out, the age of the learners, and time limits for the lesson. Typical group size is from two to four.
Assigning students to groups: Groups can be teacher-selected, random, or student-selected. Teacher selected is recommended.
Student roles in groups: Each group member has a specific role to play in a group, such as noise monitor, turn-taker monitor, recorder, or summarizer.
cooperative learning tasks
Team practice from common input – skills development and mastery of facts.
All students work on the same material.
The task is to make sure that everyone in the group knows the answer to a question and can explain how the answer was obteined.
This technique is good for review and for practice tests; The group takes the practice test together, but each student will eventually d8o an assignment or take a test individually.
This technique is effective in situations where the composition of the groups is unstable. Students can form new groups every day
Jigsaw: differentiated but predetermined imput- evaluation and synthesis of facts and opinions.
Each group member receives adifferent piece of the information.
Students regroup in topic groups (expert groups) composed of people with the same piece to master the material and prepare to teach it.
Students synthesize the imformation through discussion.
Each student produces an assignment of part of a group project.
This method of organization may require team-building activities for both home groups and topic groups, long term group involvement, and rehearsal of presentation methods.
This method is very useful in the multilevel class, allowing for both homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping in terms of English proficiency.
Coopertive projects: topics/resources selected by students discovery learning
Topics may be different for each group.
Students identify subtopics for each member.
Steering commitee may coordinate the work of the class as a whole.
Students research the information using resources such as library reference, interviews, visual media, internet.
Students synthesize their innformation for a group presentation
Each group presents to the whole class.
Olsen and Kagan, describes 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.
Roundtable (Round Robin) 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 his or her left. Each students makes contributions in turn.
Think- Pair- Share: Teacher poses a question. Students think of a response. Students discuss their responses with a partner. Students share their partner’s response with the class
Solve – Pair – Share: teacher poses a problem. Students work out solutions individually.Students explain how they solved the problem in interview or Round Robin structures
Numbered Heads: Students number off in teams. Teacher asks a question. Heads Together – students literally put their heads together and make sure everyone knows and can explain the answer. Teacher calls a number and students with that number raise their hands to be called on, as in traditional classroom.