Cooperative Learning in English Class

英语课堂的合作学习
Cooperative Learning in English Class
Contents
Abstract (1)
Key words (1)
I. Introduction (1)
II.Theoretical Grounds (3)
2.1 Brndura’s Social Learning Theory (3)
2.2 Vigotski’s Theory of “Zone of Proximal Development” (3)
2.3 Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory (4)
2.4 The Theory of Constructivism (4)
III. Strategies for Cooperative Learning (4)
3.1 Forming Groups (4)
3.1.1 Close seat group (4)
3.1.2 Ability group (5)
3.1.3 Interest group (6)
3.1.4 Mixture group (6)
3.2 Designing Team Activities (6)
3.2.1 One-minute Papers (6)
3.2.2 Round Robin Brainstorming (6)
3.2.3 Interview (7)
3.3 S tudents’ Roles in Cooperation (7)
3.4 Teacher’s Role in Cooperative Learning (8)
3.4.1 Teacher as manager and organizer (9)
3.4.2 Teacher as participant and language resource (10)
3.4.3 Teacher as facilitator (10)
IV.Disadvantages and Problems (10)
4.1 Class Control (11)
4.2 Inactive Learners in Cooperative Activity (11)
4.3 Insufficient Cooperative Work (12)
4.4 Unreasonable Question (12)
V.Advantages and Significance (12)
VI.Conclusion (13)
References (14)
Cooperative Learning in English Class
摘要: 社会的发展要求学生形成新的学习方式。

课程改革的基本理念之一就是积极倡导自主、合作、探究的学习方式。

随着国际交流的越来越频繁，现在的社会越来越需要合作，而且恰当的合作会带来意想不到的收获。

对于学生来说，在学习中培养合作意识，锻
炼合作能力也就显得尤为重要了。

本文根据国际语言环境和英语的交流性特点，通过与
中国传统的英语课堂教学的种种不足的对比，指出了在英语课堂中采取合作教学方法的
合理性及可行性，着重探讨了合作学习的计划，接着探讨了如何面对及解决合作学习中
所遇到的问题，从而较全面的证明了合作学习在教学中有着明显的优势。

关键词: 合作学习, 交流, 小组活动, 英语课堂, 传统英语教学
Abstract: According to the needs of development of society, students must form a new learning approach. And a free, cooperative and explored learning method is one
of the basic theories of curriculum reform. With its frequent international
communication, cooperation is needed in many fields in our society, and it brings
in much vigor and success. As to students, it is very important to develop their
awareness of cooperation, and they should practice their cooperative ability in
learning. According to international language environment and the characteristic
of English language---- communication, and compared with some shortage in
traditional English teaching, this paper points out the property and feasibility of
cooperative learning in English class, and then it focus on strategies for
cooperative learning and how to solve the disadvantages and problems during
cooperative learning, at last explains the advantages and significance of
cooperative learning in English class.
Key words: cooperative learning, communicate, group activity, English class, traditional English teaching
I. Introduction
It is known to us all, with its frequent international cooperation and communication, China is in urgent need of many different kinds of professionals with a superior level of English language proficiency. So English has become more and more popular nowadays, and China has the largest English language learning population in the world. However, most students have got nothing other than reciting large quantity of linguistic knowledge after more than ten years learnin g English, and even most students just like “deaf” or “mute” when they communicate with foreigners (He Meihui, 2003) The problem is mainly because that English class in China is still controlled by teacher-centered grammar cramming method and students’ pas sively listening method.
In traditional English class, the teacher is an authority. He/She controls the whole class, and teaches the whole class by cramming linguistic knowledge to students no matter how much students can understand or digest. Students just listen to the teacher passively and take notes; they have few opportunities to develop their skill in communicating with others in English, while they need to spend their large portion of time in memorizing a list of grammatical principle and a large of new words, and repeating these again and again to achieve a good mark in the English examination. So many students and even some teachers hold that learning English just for the examination. So the more this method is used frequently, the more students bec ome “deaf” or “mute” in English communication. Therefore, this traditional teaching method is not any longer suitable for students learning English, and we must find out a new scientific method. As to English, as a tool of communication, we should not only recite some grammatical principle and a large collection of words, but also use it actively and frequently to develop our communication skill and interpersonal skill. And communication is the final aim for us to learn a language. Learning English is also for communicating with others in the international environment. According to this, we must look for another teaching method in English learning, while Cooperative learning is an efficient method in English learning.
Cooperative learning is defined as “gro up leaning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his or her own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others” (Olsen & Kagan, 1992).And in this educational approach, students and the teacher are in a state of dynamic cooperation, together building up an intimate learning and social atmosphere in the classroom to reach learning goals. In cooperative learning class, knowledge and authority are shared between
the teacher and students. And cooperative learning is believed to be an effective way of learning English. When cooperation is used well in English class, it can activate the atmosphere of classroom, in spire students’ motivation of learning English, develop students’ intelligence and develop various personalities of students, enhance relationship or friendship between partners, enlarge student’s mind, and promote students’ communicative ability in English. Cooperative learning can provide students with more chance to choose challenging tasks that they are interested in, to exhibit control and autonomy, and to collaborate with peers. Therefore, cooperative learning condition is believed to motivate students positively. And cooperative learning also produces more positive relationship among students, healthier psychological adjustment and more favorable attitudes towards learning than do competitive or individualistic experiences. It can also enhance student s’ satisfaction with their learning experience and can help to develop their social skills and skills in oral communication as self-esteem. And cooperative learning is a good way to improve the relationship between teacher and their students because of tea cher’s participation.
II.Theoretical Grounds
The idea of cooperative learning originated in the United States in 1970s and was developed into a teaching strategy in the 1980s. It has been tested in David Johnson’s Cooperative Learning Center at the University of Minnesota. The leading experts in this field are David Johnson, Roger Johnson and Robert Slavin amongst others. The term “cooperative” is used in contrast to “competitive” and “individualistic”. In many countries, cooperative learning is considered one of the most creative teaching strategies and China started to introduce cooperative learning in the 1990s. And from that time, many educators have studied this, and experiment in some schools at different levels. Such as, Tang (1996) made an experiment in Hong Kong, and Guo Xiangju took an experiment from September 2001 to June 2003 in a college.
And the concept of cooperative learning is based on the following theories:
2.1 Brndura’s Social Learning Theory
It points out that learning is going on in condition of interaction of these three elements which are environment, learner and cognitive act. The pattern of cooperative learning can provide students a natural environment for interaction, and make sure that cognitive act can be developed well.
2.2 Vigotski’s Theory of “Zone of Proximal Development”
It notes that the disparity between a learner’s actual ability of solving the problem by himself (or herself) and his (or her) ability which has made progress by the help of his better-skilled classmat es or his teacher is the disparity between a learner’s degree of ability developing and potential abilities. Students’ cooperation in their own “zone of proximal development” is more super than in individual activity. So, students in different academic level can learn from others to make up for what they are unknown or unfamiliar with, and they can have a deep understanding of the problem after discussing with others. Therefore cooperative learning is a good way for students to improve their study.
2.3 Pia get’s Cognitive Development Theory
It points out that Cognitive Development Process is a process of absorption, assimilation, adjustment, and counterbalance. And it stresses that social experience knowledge (language, value, principle, morality and so on) only can gain during interactive communication with others. The pattern of cooperation provides much more opportunity for students to improve their ability of cognition.
2.4 The Theory of Constructivism
Constructivism thinks that learning is not only a process for students to accept knowledge passively, but also a process for students to build a system of knowledge. This student-centered learning process is a good one of inspiring students’ interests and motivation and expressing students’ personalities. U nder this method, students in cooperation can ceaselessly perform, assimilate, reflect and adjust, at last improve themselves and reach success (Guo Yanbing, 2002).
III. Strategies for cooperative learning
3.1 Forming Groups
Forming groups is a basic way for cooperative learning in English class, and generally we give each group or team a specific task, and then they achieve the final goal through efforts from all of team members. Forming teams depends on members of students, students’ academic level, students’ interest, seat and sex (a group should be a mixture of males and females).
3.1.1 Close Seat Group
As time limited, it is not a wise option to change students’ seat to do a cooperative activity in a class, so sometimes we should adopt “close seat principle” to organize cooperative activities (Liu Wenbiao & Shi Wenjuan, 2005), a ccording to students’ seat, pair-work and group-work both can go on.
Pair-work is a very convenient and the most used way to do cooperation. Harmer (1991) pointed out, “students can be divided to 2 persons in a group and they achieve most
practice
According to this table, Sun Qiantu ( 2002 ) pointed out, Student A1 can form a group with Student A2, Student B1, and Student B2, and in that way we can infer student A3 can form another group with A4, B3 and B4. And students in such a group can do a cooperative activity sufficiently because of more than one partner and also can do a face-to-face communication which help to cooperate. And sometimes each member is given a role; for example, the roles include a leader, a recorder, a reporter, and a monitor. Team member perform their function respectively according to their roles.
3.1.2 Ability Group
Ability group is considered as such two patterns: one is described like this, the whole ability of each group is almost same, but each student’s ability in every group is not the same. For example, Team of four is formed by choosing one person from the top, and one from the end and the two from the middle according to their academic level (Guo Xiangju, 2004). In such a group, students can learn from others, even the struggling level student,
and also they can help each other and go ahead together to achieve a common goal. And learning in this kind of group, students can improve their learning method by observing others’ learning; it is a very useful way for learning. In this situation, everyone should join in the cooperation, because the success of a group needs everyone’s effort, not one person. In this atmosphere, solidarity and each other’s help is more important, and the feeling of responsibility is also important. The other is explained to such a pattern: the whole class is divided into many groups, in which each student almost has the same level in English, but the entire ability of each group is different, for example, Group A (the most talented), Group B (average), Group C (less talented), and cooperative activity should be designed in different level for different groups. Pintrich, Brown & Weistein (1994) believed that students could be truly engaged in tasks when the challenges were in balance with the learners’ skills or abilities to re spond.
3.1.3 Interest Group
Students who have the same interest should be divided into a same group. Interest can make them communicate easily and would like to communicate with others. And can promote their relationship. Harmonious relationship makes students feel at ease, relax, and have no pressure, they can join the group actively and dare to exchange their opinion, and they are not afraid of undergoing mocking (Guo Yanbing, 2002).
3.1.4 Mixture Group
A group is regarded as a mixture of male and female student (Liu Jinmei, 2003), because generally boys and girls think differently when they face the same question, so this mixture group can provide a chance to exchange their different idea through cooperation, and also give those shy girls or boys a chance to practice their encouragement to speak before counter-sexes.
3.2 Designing Team Activities
Here are 3 team activities: One-minute paper, Round Robin Brainstorming, and Interview (Guo Xiangju, 2004).
3.2.1 One-minute Papers
One-minute papers can be used to facilitate a group discussion or to provide feedback to the teacher. This activity focuses students on the content. Papers should be immediately followed by a team discussion, making good use of these papers. It can develop students’ ability of finding and solving problems. After discussing the content together, they may have a deep impression of the content. William (1991) pointed that students can understand a passage much better after discussing in groups rather than passively
listening.
3.2.2 Round Robin Brainstorming
Round robin brainstorming can be used in this situation, a question has several kinds of answers, and students are given time to think about, after thinking, members of team share ideas and the team recorder writes down the answers. For example, Unit7 Living with Disease (book I, Grade 2 of Senior Middle School), after finishing a first listening of passage, there is a question in the book, “If you were a disease detective, what would you do to learn more about a new disease?” This qu estion is to develop students’ skill of thinking according to some information of disease. Students discuss in different groups to express their ideas about this, and many answers can be collected, such as, A: If I were a disease detective, I would collect important information about this new disease.
B: If I were a disease detective, I would visit the sick person and find out the detailed information.
C: If I were a disease detective, I would find out the symptoms of this new disease.
D: If I were a disease detective, I would look for viruses or bacteria in blood samples in the lab.
E: …
3.2.3 Interview
Interview is a multi-roles activity; it is a good activity for each member to practice. Each member has his own role, this activity give everyone a deep sense of cooperation and responsibility for his group. Take Unit 9 the Earth Summit (bookⅠ, of Grade 2 of Senior Middle school); Many kinds of environment problems are collected in this unit. For example, it is a situation that there is plenty of coal under the ground in a village, and more and more are explored in present years. According to this situation, a reporter interviewed a native citizen, a businessman, a worker and an environmentalist, and students play their different role and cooperate in their own groups to achieve this interview. Interview is a much more difficult cooperative activity in English class. It is challenging students’ integrated communication skill, which cont ains listening, speaking, and thinking.
3.3 Students’ Roles in Cooperation
Students are the king actors in cooperative learning, and they must change their passive roles for active ones. Compared with students who obtained knowledge passively and had no freedom except obeying to teacher’s order in traditional English learning cl ass,
students are the main actors in cooperative learning class, and the classroom is their stage. “Their major roles are collaborator and active participator. It is useful to think how these new roles influence the processes and activities students conduct before, during, and after learning” (M.B.Tinzmann, B. F. Jones, T. F. Fennimore and J. Bakker, 1990).For example, before learning, students set goals and plan learning tasks; during learning, they work together to accomplish tasks and monitor their progress; and after learning, they assess their performance and plan for future learning. They have a right to choose the topic which their group members are interested in and they can participate in several cooperative works to practice their communicate skills. They have their own comprehension of the topic of cooperative work, and they can talk what their opinions are freely, and they have ability to decide what each individual has to do and how to do in cooperation. Under this free environment everyone has a sense of responsibility of group, and have awareness of cooperation. They must realize that success of group is from each individual’s effort.
As to students, self-regulated learning is important in cooperative classrooms. Students learn to take responsibility for monitoring, adjusting, self-questioning, and questioning each other. Such self-regulating activities are critical for students to learn today, and they are much better learned within a group that shares responsibility for learning. Monitoring is checking one's progress toward goals. Adjusting refers to changes students make, based on monitoring, in what they are doing to reach their goals. Students can further develop their self-regulating abilities when each group shares its ideas with other groups and gets feedback from them.
Self-assessment in cooperative English learning classroom is also a new responsibility of students; it is intimately related to ongoing monitoring of one's progress toward achievement of learning goals. M.B.Tinzmann, B. F. Jones, T. F. Fennimore and J. Bakker (1990) pointed out, “In a cooperative classroom, assessment means more than just assigning a grade. It means evaluating whether one has learned what one intends to learn, the effectiveness of learning strategies, the quality of products and decisions about which products reflect one's best work, the usefulness of the materials used in a task, and whether future learning is needed and how that learning might be realized.”Assessment in cooperative learning class is less threatening than which is in a traditional situation. So students feel freer to express doubts, feelings of success, remaining questions, than when they are evaluated only by a teacher. Therefore, self-assessment is a way to make students’cooperative learning more impressive.
3.4 Teacher’s Role in Cooperative Learning
Students play the important role in cooperation, but it dose not mean the teacher has nothing to do. Teacher also has a new task in cooperation. Teacher is not a knowledge pourer again, but an inspirer of students’ potential. In cooperative classroom, teacher’s role has been changed, compared with teacher’s role of class-controller in traditional English class. “He or she is considered to be a manager and organizer, a participant and language resource, and a facilitator” (Chen Li li, 2004. M.B.Tinzmann, B. F. Jones, T. F. Fennimore and J. Bakker, 1990).
3.4.1 Teacher as Manager and Organizer
In the cooperative classroom, a teacher must be the principal agent of curriculum development. Also, the teacher should take the responsibilities of organizing various kinds of activities and games which are appropriate, effective and relevant to the classroom teaching and which will best meet the students’ needs and expectations. But the teacher should bear in mind that he /she should give clear instructions as to what is to be done because the success of many activities, no matter whether it is a specific role-play or a group discussion, which depends on good organization and on the students’ knowing exactly what they are expected to do. (Chen Lil i, 2004.12) Teacher’s role as manager and organizer is considered to be the most important and difficult the teacher has to play in class. Before organizing an activity, the teacher should consider much information, such as, students’ interests (or needs) and level, time of activity, and what kind of problem students might meet. When assigning an activity in the class, the teacher should give an instruction, or students may misunderstand the topic or students lose interests in activity because of unknowing how to do and what to do, and then students’ performance is terrible, students have learned nothing but wasting time, so an activity like this is meaningless.
3.4.2 Teacher as Participant and Language Resource
The teacher is expected to fulfill in collaborative learning class is participant and language resource. In any form of classroom activities that enable students to play with the language they have learned for efficient communication, the teacher should not isolate him /herself from the students, for the whole process of teaching and learning of English involves the participation of both parts. During the participation in classroom activities, the teacher is also expected to be the language resource. There’s no doubt that it is the teacher’s responsibility to ensure necessary language input and to offer help whenever it is needed. The teacher should help students to acquaint themselves with the target language and culture. He should also make students aware that language is always learned for communicative purpose (Chen Lili, 2004).
When students do a cooperative activity, the teacher should go around the whole class
to see the process each collaborative activity instead of the traditional way of just staying at the platform. During this process, the onus is on the teacher to encourage students to produce their own language and give students necessary instruction or inspiration when group work is not good enough, and the teacher also should correct students’ erro rs so as to help students develop their own learning strategies and techniques both at the sentence level and the discourse level. Sometimes teacher can join in some group to discuss with student about a question, because the metaphor for cooperative learning class is also shared knowledge. “The teacher has vital knowledge about content, skills, and instruction, and still provides that information to students. However, collaborative teachers also value and build upon the knowledge, personal experiences, language, strategies, and culture that students bring to the learning situation.” So cooperative learning between students and their teacher is necessary, it can provide a chance for teacher and students to know each other more during such face-to-face cooperation and it help for building up a harmonious relationship between students and their teacher.
3.4.3 Teacher as Facilitator
In order to train students’ ability to communicate effectively, the teacher should try every means to enable students to play to the best of their potentials. In this sense, one of the teacher’s main roles is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and text. Facilitation involves encouragement and assisting (Chen Lili, 2004), and M.B.Tinzmann, B. F. Jones, T. F. Fennimore and J. Bakker explained teacher’s role as facilitator, “Facilitator Facilitating involves creating rich environments and activities for linking new information to prior knowledge, providing opportunities for collaborative work and problem solving, and offering students a multiplicity of authentic learning tasks.” In traditional EFT, the teacher controls the whole class and places much emphasis on the amount of information he/she offers. However, in cooperative learning class, the teacher becomes a bridge between language input and output. His main task here is to excavate all students’ potentials as possible as he/she can, and promot e students’ ability of using English language, especially when students are anxious about their performance. They should create a free, relax but active atmosphere for students, and encourage every student to join in the collaborative work. The teacher also should provide each individual student with opportunities to participate, to practice and to produce. This will enable the students to have deep insight into their potentials and as a result they will become more self-confident and ensure more effective learning (Chen Lili, 2004).
IV.Disadvantages and Problems
Many teachers have accepted this new teaching theory: cooperative learning, and have adopted this method in their teaching. Some of them also have made a little progress, but some still are laymen of this teaching approach, and there are still some disadvantages and problems in their teaching. There are several examples which reflect some problems in cooperative learning in English class, and then we analyze what cause these problems and how to solve these problems in order to make cooperative learning more efficient.
4.1 Class Control
Cooperative classrooms tend to be noisier than traditional classrooms. This is a legitimate issue for a number of people. Some teachers believe that noisy classrooms indicate lack of discipline or teacher control. In such situations, they argue, students cannot learn (, B. F. Jones, T. F. Fennimore and J. Bakker, 1990). Actually, cooperative learning class is noisier than traditional English learning class, because students need opportunities to move about, ask questions, discuss and so on. According to this, we argue that cooperative leaning class has its structure, which is giving more freedom to students, “the noise in a smoothly running collaborative classroom indicates that active learning is going on” (M.B.Tinzmann, B. F. Jones, T. F. Fennimore and J. Bakker 1990). It dose not mean that we have no rule in cooperative learning class, indeed, rules and standards must be stressed from the beginning. During the process of cooperation, the teacher should monitor students’ activity to go smoothly. If someone doesn’t join in the cooperation, but make a noise to interfere others, the teacher must help him. The teacher can manage the whole class and help students to achieve their learning goal, and they can stop anything of out-order.
4.2 Inactive Learners in Cooperative Activity
Some students are in silence when team work begins. They only think over the question on his or her own, rather than join the group and they doesn’t communicate with other teammates. It is mainly caused by two factor s, one is that teacher doesn’t motivate students’ related knowledge about the topic before cooperation, which makes students lack of interests in this topic ; and the other is that students are lack of awareness and ability of cooperation.
Solution: teacher’s instruction to cooperation is very important for cooperative learning, before the cooperation, teacher should give inspiration of the topic, and motivate
students’ interests of the topic, and then give students helpfu l advice and instruction properly. Students must do some preparation for new lesson before they do cooperation in a class. And then each student should have an awareness of communicate or cooperate with others. And another point we should pay attention to is that students in the same group need a good relationship, and the help from teammates is necessary. The relationship between teacher and students are also is important. Good relationship can create a free and relaxed atmosphere, and also change the result of cooperative learning.
4.3 Insufficient Cooperative Work
Sometimes cooperative activity ends after the activity begins just only 2-3 minutes. The problem is that there are too many teaching tasks to go on. Teacher reduces the time of cooperative work to go to next topic, and then to finish the teaching task (Zheng Shiqiang, 2003) and sometimes cooperative work is not sufficient because students’ ability, such groups’ work still in superficial level after discussing in much time.
Solution: if there are too many topics to discuss, but the time is not enough, the teacher and students should select one or two valuable topic to discuss in group and exchange and share ideas between teacher and students or between students in different groups in class and the left can be finished in cooperative group outside of class. If cooperative work is not sufficient because of students’ ability, then, we should pay much attention to forming groups with different level students, so that the top level student can help the struggling student to finish the group work together.
4.4 Unreasonable Question
The question designed for cooperation is not reasonable. Sometimes the question given to students is too easy, most students get the answer quickly, with neither discussion nor reading the book, even not to think more. In this situation, many students looks active in class, but students get nothing actually in this class, because they just only talk something they are very familiar with, it is no use for students to learn new knowledge, it is just a way to waste time. And sometime the question or the topic is too difficult; it is also no use for students’ learning. Because students can’t understand the topic or question, so they have no ideas. In this situation, the class becomes very quiet, and the cooperation fails.
Solution: the teacher’s choice of the topic must depend on students’ academic level, students’ interests and also must regard the value of this topic. The cooperation will fail if the teacher doesn’t regard any of these three.。