Part A: INTRODUCTION

I. Background to the study
“Better English, more opportunities” is the answer of most university students when they
are asked about their goal of learning English. English can help them prepare well for future
career as it can not only equip them with a useful source of personal, linguistic, social and
cultural knowledge but also provide them with access to modern technology, information
concerning a variety of issues in modern society. Especially, our country’s recent regional and
global participation has been increasing the demand for English speaking people who are
expected to communicate verbally with the outside world and access modern technology. For
these reasons, at the tertiary level where the source of English teachers for the whole country is
provided, English teaching has been granted special supports from educational authorities. The
most important issue in this field, which has presented various complicated problems for
generations of English teachers in Vietnam is the adoption of an appropriate English teaching
method which can satisfy the need of the society.
With this orientation, in recent years, the teaching and learning English in Vietnam has
been considerably changing. With the efforts of several international projects and organizations
such as VAT (Vietnam Australia Training), VSO (Voluntary Service Oversea), … and groups of
teachers who attended TESL, TEFL or TESOL courses, various new approaches, methods and
techniques on the teaching of English have been introduced and applied in schools, colleges and
universities nationwide. Generally, English teaching has shift from the traditional grammar
translation approach to the communicative approach. New textbooks and syllabus that are
communication-oriented and learner-centered are designed and implemented, which all required
teachers of English to improve their teaching skills to be successful in the classroom. Every year,
many teachers training courses are hold and after attending the training courses, almost all

successfully in the classrooms is a question of great concern for many language teachers and
language researchers.
The most important reason why we purse this study on groupwork derived from our own
experience of being a teacher who failed to organize students to work successfully in group
activities. At Gialai teacher’s training college, the unique college in a mountainous town, Pleiku,
the students have very little chance to use the language, so most of them are very shy to speak.
Moreover, the students have mixed levels of speaking competence (some of them are minority
people). During speaking activities, the strong ones speak a lot, the average speak some and the
weak students seem to keep silent all the time. Some strategies have been carried out such as
talking to them to find their problems, choosing interesting topics, monitoring frequently to help
and encouraging the weak one to speak and ask the strong one help their friends by assigning the
roles for them and keep asking questions to force them to speak. This however can not help
much. They speak just a little and the keep silent again. We kept on finding the ways to get all
our students involved in the class speaking activities. During the search, we found some articles
about implementing cooperative learning structures to improve group activities in which
cooperative structures can be used as a mean to improve students’ cooperation, participation and
even their language proficiency. What it meant to us was that the way we organize and structure
groupwork affected students’ involvement in group activities.
There are sound reasons to take CL into implementation. First of all, CL is highly
appreciated for their usefulness to students’ achievement. “CL seems to provide an environment
in which students’ needs of love, belongingness, power, freedom and fun can be met in a way
that is beneficial for both academic achievement and the development of the learners’ social and
learning skills” (D.W. Johnson el al.1990; Slavin 1987; Kagan 1989). It is undeniable that CL is
the most flexible and powerful grouping strategies because in CL, learners work together to
accomplish a shared goal. Therefore, they are motivated to work together for mutual benefit in
order to meet their own and each other’ learning. Additionally, CL has a strong foundation on

involved in the CL training and implementing program which are topic- and task- based are
developed during the course progression. The topics are suggested by the students and selected in

open class, the tasks and activities structured along CL are designed and developed with the aims
of improving students’ participation and achievement in oral communication skills. Thus, the first
and foremost objective of the study is for the sake of the students. Besides, the study is expected
to serve as a source of reference for teachers of English on the teaching of speaking skills,
especially for those who concern CL, one of the educational innovations which has the best and
largest empirical base.
To be more specific, in realizing the study, the main objectives are:
 To investigate the effects of CL on Students’ participation in oral communication
activities
 To investigate the effects of CL on the students’ achievement in speaking skills
 To give some pedagogical implications and suggestions for further development.
With those aims, my research questions with sub-questions are:
1. What are the effects of CL on students’ participation in the group activities?
- Are the students motivated to participate?
- Is the amount of the students’ participation increased and divided equally?
- Is the nature of the students’ participation improved?
2. What are the effects of CL on students’ achievement?
- Do the students get higher achievement in oral examinations?
- What oral communication skills do the students develop?
3. What are the students’ attitudes towards CL?
IV. Methods of the study
This research is realized with regards to both qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Besides, there are also nine appendixes in which supplementary materials and list of references
are provided.

PATR B: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter is concerned with some of the most important issues in theory of cooperative
learning in general and in language teaching in particular. The main features will be taken into
consideration, namely, theoretical background of CL and CLL and theoretical background of
speaking, the language skill to which CL is intended to be applied.
I. Experimental language learning as cooperative learning
Two models of teaching
As a result of developments in society and educational theory, the pedagogical thinking
has been shifting away from the traditional behavioristic model of teaching as transmission of
knowledge towards an experiential model whereby teaching is seen as transformation of existing
or partly understood knowledge, based on constructivist view of learning.
Nunan (1988) assumed that in the transmission model of teaching, the teacher is the
person in authority in the class whose job is to impart knowledge and skills to the learners.
Knowledge is seen as deniable in terms of right and wrong answers. Students tend to see their
role as relatively passive recipients of the knowledge, expecting the teacher to be in charge of
their learning. Or, Glasser (1986) gave an example of this model the traditional structure of a
secondary school with a teacher in front of the room facing thirty to forty students. The
underlying behavioristic model involves various rewards and sanctions to ensure learning. But
there are limits to what we pressure the students to learn if they do not experience satisfaction in
their work. Sanction will cause discipline problems and underlying tensions in class in which
teacher has the final word and the power to reward, punish and evaluate. Students learn as
individuals, and the cooperation is limited by competition for grades.


3. Teacher’s role 4. Learner’s role Transmission of Knowledge
Emphasis on teacher’s authority

Providing mainly frontal
instruction; professionalism as
individual autonomy
Relatively passive recipient of
information; mainly individual
work
Transformation of Knowledge
Teacher as a learner among
learners
Facilitating learning (largely in
small groups); collaborative
professionalism
Active participation, largely in
cooperative small groups 5. View of knowledge

Construction of personal
knowledge; identification of
problems
Dynamic; looser organization of
subject matter, including open
parts and integration
Emphasis on process: learning
skills, self inquiry, social and
communication skills
Emphasis on learner: self-
directed learning
Mainly intrinsic

Process-oriented: reflection on
process, self-assessment;
criterion-referencing
(Nunan (1993): Collaborative Language Leaning and Teaching)

Generally, in experiential learning, the schools are made more effective by ensuring that
learners’ basic needs for love, belongingness, power, freedom and fun are satisfied from their
early classes onwards. As Glasser (1986:54) points out that, there is no sense in telling learners
how valuable classes are and how much they need them unless we can structure classes so that
they are more satisfying to them. CL seems to provide a classroom environment in which such
needs can be met in a way that is beneficial for both academic achievement and the development
of the learners’ social and learning skills.
It is certain that any more discussion of CL should originate from CL definitions, which
will be dealt with in the next section.

Tang (1998,p.116) offers an international perspective on CL, emphasizing the practices and effects
of CL.: Cooperative learning provides a non-threatening learning context for interaction between
students. During CL, students are exposed to other perspectives and alternatives, the share and
exchange ideas, criticize and provide feedback. Peer feedback can help students increase their
awareness of their learning aims, and of the strategies to employ to achieve those aims. Cooperation
provides “scaffolding” for mutual support and enables students to learn from each other. The
function is teaching function, although the major interaction is student-student, rather than teacher-
student.
It can be clearly seen from these definitions that the key to CL is the careful structuring of
learning groups. And generally, cooperative learning methods share the following five
characteristics:
• Student work together on common tasks or learning activities that are best handled through
group work.
• Students work together in small groups containing two to five members.
• Students use cooperative, pro-social behavior to accomplish their common tasks or learning
activities.
• Students are positively interdependent. Activities are structured so that students need each
other to accomplish their common tasks or learning activities.
• Students are individually accountable or responsible for their work or learning.
Moreover, the reason why we use cooperative learning is that cooperative learning
enhances student learning by:
• providing a shared cognitive set of information between students,
• motivating students to learn the material,
• ensuring that students construct their own knowledge,
• providing formative feedback,
• developing social and group skills necessary for success outside the classroom
• promoting positive interaction between members of different cultural groups

activities. Actually, there exists no one generally accepted version of CL. Indeed, disparate
theoretical perspectives on learning, including behaviourism, sociocultural theory, humanist
psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology and Piagetian developmental psychology
have informed the development of different approaches to CL. Thus, various principles have
been put forward in the CL literature (e.g., Baloche, 1998, Jacobs, Power, & Loh, 2002, Johnson
& Johnson, 1999, Kagan, 1994 and Slavin, 1995). In the next section, eight CL principles and
how they can inform teaching practice will be discussed.
III. Principles of cooperative learning
III.1. Heterogeneous Grouping:
This principle means that the groups in which students do CL tasks are mixed on one or
more of a number of variables including sex, ethnicity, social class, religion, personality, age,
language proficiency and diligence. Heterogeneous grouping is believed to have a number of
benefits in comparison with homogeneous grouping, such as encouraging peer tutoring,
providing a variety of perspectives, helping students come to know and like others different from
themselves and fostering appreciation of the value of diversity.
In CL, groups often stay together for five weeks or more. To achieve heterogeneous
groups for speaking activities, teachers might want to look at their class and make conscious
decisions about which students should work together, rather than leaving the matter to chance or
to students’ choice. The latter option often results in groups with low levels of heterogeneity.
Furthermore, when we opt for heterogeneous groups, we may want to spend some time on ice
breaking (also known as teambuilding) activities, because as Slavin (1995) notes, the
combination of students that results from teacher-selected groups is likely to be one that would
never have been created had it not been for our intervention.
III.2. Collaborative Skills: Collaborative skills are those needed to work with others. Students
may lack these skills, the language involved in using the skills or the inclination to apply the
skills during a reading aloud session. Most books and websites on cooperative learning urge that
collaborative skills be explicitly taught one at a time. Which collaborative skill to teach will
depend on the particular students and the particular task they are undertaking? Just a few of the

from each group can go to another group. These representatives explain (not just show or tell)
their group’s ideas. Of course, simultaneous and sequential interaction may be usefully
combined.
III.5. Equal Participation (Kagan, 1994):
A frequent problem in groups is that one or two group members dominate the group and,
for whatever reason, impede the participation of others. CL offers many ways of promoting equal
participation in groups. Two of these are the use of rotating roles in a group, such as facilitator,
checker (who checks to see that everyone understands what the group is doing/has done),
questioner, praiser, encourager and paraphraser, and the use of multiple ability tasks (Cohen,
1994; Gardner, 1999), i.e., tasks that require a range of abilities, such as drawing, singing, acting
and categorizing, rather than only language abilities.
III. 6. Individual Accountability:
Individual accountability is, in some ways, the flip side of equal participation. When we
encourage equal participation in groups, we want everyone to feel they have opportunities to take
part in the group. When we try to encourage individual accountability in groups, we hope that no
one will attempt to avoid using those opportunities. Techniques for encouraging individual
accountability seek to avoid the problem of groups known variously as social loafing, sleeping
partners or free riding.
These techniques, not surprisingly, overlap with those for encouraging equal
participation. They include giving each group member a designated turn to participate, keeping
group size small, calling on students at random to share their group’s ideas and having a task to
be done individually after the group activity is finished.
III.7. Positive Interdependence:
This principle lies at the heart of CL. When positive interdependence exists among
members of a group, they feel that what helps one member of the group helps the other members
and that what hurts one member of the group hurts the other members. It is the “All for one, one

of learning, cooperation also becomes part of the content to be learned, i.e., the what of learning.
This flows naturally from the most crucial CL principle, positive interdependence. Cooperation
as a value involves taking the feeling of “All for one, one for all” and expanding it beyond the
small classroom group to encompass the whole class, the whole school, on and on, bringing in

increasingly greater numbers of people and other beings into students’ circle of ones with whom
to cooperate.
One way of expanding the scope of the positive interdependence felt by students is to read
aloud books and other materials on the themes related to cooperation and global issues. Global
issues include such areas of education as peace education, environmental education, human rights
education, multicultural education, and development education (Smallwood, 1991; TESOLers for
Social Responsibility Wood, Roser, & Martinez, 2001).
We have just look at the definitions as well as principles of CL, in the next section, some
common cooperative learning structures and techniques will be presented with the aim of setting
the clear and helpful reference for the CL training and implementing program in the next chapter.
IV. Cooperative Learning Structures and Techniques
What are cooperative learning structures?
Structures are very specific cooperative learning strategies that teachers can use to organize
interaction between students. Most structures can be used with almost any academic content, but
some structures are better than others for certain tasks. Some structures regulate interaction
between pairs, some are better for group work, and others involve the entire class. The key is
learning structures is best-suited for a particular instructional purpose. Following are some of the
structures developed by Dr. Spencer Kagan most commonly used in language class.
1. Round robin
Students in teams take turns orally responding to a question or prompt. You can have
questions on slips of paper in the middle of the team, or you can call the question aloud. For
example, you could have team members Round robin their predictions for a science experiment

One student on each team turns over a task card and reads the question aloud. Everyone
writes the answer on their chalkboard. Next, the leader asks students to show their answers to the
team. Team members discuss the correct answer and the leader records the answer for the team.
8.Line Ups Students line up in order according to a topic named by the teacher. For example,
you could have students line up by their birthdays or first names. You can also give students
task cards with numbers or words and have them line up in order.

9.Teammates Consult
Students all have the same worksheet. They place their pencils in a cup while discussing
each question. Then they take their pencils out to silently write the answer.
10. Numbered Heads Together
The teacher calls out a question and students put their heads together in teams to discuss the
answer. Then a number is called, and one person from each team responds (without help from the
team.)
11. Jigsaw
Students are on "base teams" of four. Each student is assigned a different role as an
"expert." All experts with the same topic meet in a corner of the classroom to learn about their
topic. Then they prepare a brief presentation on the material and return to their base teams. They
teach their base team members the new material they learned.
12. Corners
The teacher calls out a question or a prompt and names 4 possible answers or responses.
The teacher designates a corner of the room for each response. Students write down their
personal answer and move to the corner of the room that represents their choice. They pair up
with another student to discuss why they chose that answer or response.
13. Mix-N-Match
A great classroom review structure that also serves as a classbuilder. Each student is given a
problem or answer card, and they move around the room searching for their "match." This

comprehend meaning in that language in the form of written or spoken words. Thus, reading and
listening provide input which our brains utilize to build language competence. Our knowledge
advances as we understand input at the i+1 level, i.e., input that is slightly above our current level of
competence.
Three ways that CL helps increase the quantity of comprehensible input are:
a) Peers can provide each other with comprehensible input.
b) Input from fellow learners is likely to be comprehensible.

c) Peer groups may provide a more motivating, less anxiety-producing environment for language
use, thus, increasing the chances that students will take in more input.
V.2. The interaction hypothesis
A second hypothesis about language learning that overlaps with CL is the Interaction
Hypothesis which states that language learners increase the quantity of comprehensible input they
receive by interacting with their interlocutors (the people with whom they are speaking). This
interaction is called negotiating for meaning. Pica (1994: 494) defines negotiation for meaning as
"the modification and restructuring of interaction that occurs when learners and their interlocutors
anticipate, perceive, or experience difficulties in message comprehensibility." Students negotiate for
meaning by such means as requesting repetition, explanation and clarification. Reid (1993) states
that negotiating for meaning can also take place during peer feedback on student writing.
Two ways that CL may promote interaction are:
a) Group activities, especially those in which members feel positively interdependent and
individually accountable, provide a context in which students may be more likely to interact than in
a whole class setting.
b) Long (1996) proposes that group activities can encourage students to interact with each other in a
way that promotes a focus on form, i.e., "to attend to language as object during a generally meaning-
oriented activity" (p. 429). Such a focus on form can be encouraged when grammar constitutes at
least one aspect of group tasks.

Vygotsky’s strategy was essentially a cooperative learning strategy. He created heterogeneous
groups of … children (he called them a collective), providing them not only with the opportunity
but the need for cooperation and joint activity by giving them tasks that were beyond the
developmental level of some, if not all, of them.
V.5. Content-based instruction
The key concept underlying content-based instruction is that language is best learned
while focusing on meaning rather than focusing on the form of language. Thus, an overall
inductive approach is followed in which students learn content from anywhere in the curriculum,
e.g., science or social studies, but at the same time, they are learning grammar and vocabulary as
they receive input and produce output while learning that content.

Content-based language instruction fits well with CL (Chamot & O'Malley, 1994) as:
a) Research suggests that CL promotes learning regardless of the subject area, making it useful
for teaching any subject, not just for teaching language.
b) The CL principle cooperation as a value provides a rich vein of content that may also enhance
students’ understanding of the benefits of cooperation. Examples of such content include how
insects cooperate among each other, how environmental destruction in one part of the world
impacts plants and animals elsewhere, how people throughout history have collaborated and how
we depend on so many people in various parts of the world for so many of the things we do and
use everyday.
V.6. Individual differences
In the past, there was a tendency in education towards an assembly line model of education
in which all students were to learn in the same way. Today, the pendulum has swung somewhat, and
there is a great appreciation of the many differences that exist between students and a belief that
teaching needs to take these differences into account. Kagan and Kagan (1998) capture this new
perspective in the slogan “The more ways we teach, the more pupils we reach” (Cohen. 2, p. 6).
The individual differences perspective on learning fits well with CL as:

of the educational context they find themselves in. Therefore, affective factors, such as anxiety,
motivation and attitudes, demand attention in any approach to pedagogy.
Two examples of how CL might improve the affective climate and, thus, promote language
learning are:
a) when working in supportive CL groups, students may feel less anxious and more willing to take
risks
b) when students feel that groupmates are relying on them (see CL principle positive
interdependence), they may feel more motivated to make the effort needed to maximize learning
(Dornyei, 1997).
In the previous sections, we have looked at the interface between CL and language
learning. In the next section, we will present theory of CL in second language teaching which
will server as a reference for us in the implementation of CL in teaching speaking.