چکیده:
This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of fostering cooperative learningon EFL learners’ overall achievement. To fulfill the purpose of this study, 56female students of Saba Language School in Tehran were selected from a totalnumber of 90 based on their performance on the Preliminary English Test (PET)and randomly put into two experimental and control groups. The same content wastaught to both groups throughout the 24-session treatment. The only difference wasthat the experimental group was taught through communicative language teachingwith the use of cooperative learning activities, which consisted of the three-step-interview, think-pair-share, paired annotations, round robin, and learning together,while the students in the control group were taught through the communicativelanguage teaching approach without the cooperative teaching procedure. Anachievement posttest within the content taught was given to the students in bothgroups at the end of the instruction and the mean scores of both groups on the testwere compared through an independent samples t-test. The result showed therejection of the null hypothesis thus concluding that cooperative learning had asignificant effect on the overall achievement of Iranian EFL learners.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The only difference wasthat the experimental group was taught through communicative language teachingwith the use of cooperative learning activities, which consisted of the three-step-interview, think-pair-share, paired annotations, round robin, and learning together,while the students in the control group were taught through the communicativelanguage teaching approach without the cooperative teaching procedure.
As placing students in groups to work together, even under the label of cooperative learning or task structure, does not ensure that they would engage in the kinds of positive interactions that promote learning (Johnson & Johnson, 1990), the implementation of an appropriate interaction process constitutes a major component that helps improve the student outcome in many academic and behavioral problems, and establish a greater academic environment in the classroom (Aschettino, 1993).
Table 1 Modern Methods of CL (Adopted from Johnson, Johnson, & Stanne, 2000) Researcher-Developer Date Method Johnson & Johnson Mid 1970s Learning Together (LT) DeVries & Edwards Early 1970s Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT) Sharan & Sharan Mid 1970s Group Investigation (GI) Johnson & Johnson Mid 1970s Constructive Controversy Aronson & Associates Late 1970s Jigsaw Procedure Slavin & Associates Late 1970s Student Teams Achievement Divisions (STAD) Cohen Early 1980s Complex Instruction Slavin & Associates Early 1980s Team Assisted Instruction (TAI) Kagan Mid 1980s Cooperative Learning structures Stevens, Slavin & Cooperative Integrated Reading & Composition Late 1980s Associates (CIRC) Kagan Early 1990s Three-Step Interview Kagan Late 1980s Inside-Outside Circle In line with what has been discussed so far, the aim of this study was to see whether using CL in a context where the traditional whole-class lecturing method is somewhat prevalent has a significant effect on EFL learners’ overall achievement or not.