Resumen de Comparing interaction in a cooperative learning and teacher-centered foreign language classroom
Cooperative learning (CL) methods are group work methods that have recently received considerable attention in the U.S. as effective classroom methologies for increasing academic achievement, especially for minority students. Kagan (1986) has hypothesized two elements of CL interaction that might support achievement:
(i) increase in opportunities students have to produce more diverse and complex output and (ii) increase of the amount of comprehensible input students receive.
This study investigates these hypotheses for language learning by comparing the classroom interaction in a CL and in a teacher-centered (TC) lesson, recorded in a beginning university course in Dutch.
Findings showed that students as expected took more turns and produced a great deal more Dutch output in the CL setting, which supports their language acquisition. However, contrary to CL goals of providing equal opportunities for all, the stronger students-as usual- took more turns and used more Dutch than the weaker ones. Nonetheless, all students-independent of their proficiency level-asked many questions, modifying their input to a comprehensible level and making language acqusition possible. In terms of quality of output, students proportionally produced fewer ungrammatical Dutch utterances and fewer errors were corrected in the CL setting. In addition, vocabulary usage was more diverse as well as more repetitious. No significant difference between both settings was found in the complexity of students' Dutch.
