The Language Teacher
July 2002
Collaborating with Learners In and Out of the Classroom
Michael Rost
Pearson Education Japan
As with many language teachers, it took me a long time to make sense of the concepts of learning strategies and learning styles, and to understand the direct impact of these concepts on my teaching. At first, I thought of these ideas as relevant only to researchers interested in describing language acquisition and not to teachers who have the daily concerns of planning classes, motivating and interacting with their students. In graduate school, I was required to read and analyze the "good learner studies" (e.g. Rubin, 1975). Try as I might, I didn't really appreciate how knowing "what successful learners do" would directly help me in my teaching since I believed that good learners would result from good teaching: my lesson planning, my activities, my teaching skill. I wanted to learn how to be a better teacher, not just a better observer.
A quantum leap in my thinking occurred when I encountered the idea of "collaboration" in language teaching. This seemed to encompass the concepts of learning styles and strategies in that collaboration suggested a two-way exchange between me and my students. For the first time, it made sense to me to begin combining the themes from the early cooperative learning research in L1 education (e.g. Kagan, 1985; Slavin, 1980) with the themes of the learning strategy research in L2 education (e.g. Dickinson, 1987; Benson & Voller, 1997).
The L1 research, based on classroom observations and reports from participants, consistently showed that increasing the involvement of learners (in interactions with each other, in controlling and evaluating learning activities) enhanced not only student academic achievement, but also developed better long-term learning attitudes and relationships with other students. (In these L1 contexts, the relationships were often among students of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.) Much of the L2 research on learning strategies, which has become inexorably linked to the notion of autonomous learning, consistently reported that self-directed activities (such as use of computer labs or self-access reader centers), in addition to classroom studies, nearly always lead to faster gains in proficiency and marked increases in self-confidence and motivation. Although these were not surprising findings, these pleasant by-products alone seemed very powerful supports for employing the idea of "collaboration" in language learning. The decisive factor for me in wanting to incorporate collaboration into my own teaching was, however, that one of the consistent benefits of this approach is teacher satisfaction. Nothing like a formula for preventing burnout to increase a language teacher's interest in a different approach!
So this much seems obvious: If there is evidence that increasing student-teacher collaboration leads to greater learner achievement and teacher satisfaction, it makes sense to look at potent ways of incorporating collaboration into our teaching. We need to understand and to influence the ways that our students learn both in class and outside of class. Effective collaboration with students then involves both "inner" and "outer" aspects: (a) ways in which teachers and students make decisions about what to do inside the classroom, and (b) ways in which the teacher and students communicate about what the students can and will do outside of the classroom to promote their own learning.
There are three fundamental approaches to implementing--or even just experimenting with--this kind of collaboration:
- Resource-based approaches: Learners are presented with options for utilizing pre-selected materials (such as graded readers and videotapes of television shows) and technologies (such as computers and video players), and take responsibility for completing some assignments outside of class meeting time. The most effective resource-based approaches involve pre-selection of high interest, relevant materials, and preparation of motivating tasks for each set of materials. Also the most successful approaches involve some conscious integration of out-of-class learning with in-class learning (Benson, 2001).
- Learner-based approaches: Learners are presented with ongoing, direct instruction in learning strategies (choices for approaching learning tasks) and communication strategies (choices for interacting with people in the target language), and are asked to identify the strategies that seem to work best for them. In this approach, learners are expected to see how strategy use influences their learning inside the classroom (e.g. by monitoring how many questions they ask during an activity) and outside the classroom (e.g. by choosing between two accompanying tasks on a home-study assignment). The most successful approaches typically involve keeping of learning journals (with some ongoing teacher feedback on the content). Another predictor of success in this approach is the students having access to audio or video of themselves in classroom activities, so that they can review what they have done in particular tasks (Cotteral, 1999).
- Curriculum-based approaches: Learners are given a great deal of control over the processes in the classroom, such as through a dominant use of group projects (e.g. student pairs research related topics, such as a favorite childhood story or game, and prepare an original 15-minute slide presentation) and surveys outside of class. This kind of approach entails the learners taking more responsibility for the class content (while the teacher guides language development), and performing most of the activities during class time with the teacher assuming a facilitator-feedback provider role (Gardner & Miller, 1999).
These are just the basic frameworks for including collaboration into our teaching. We can choose and combine as best fits our situation and comfort-level. As with any change in our teaching practice, it's important to remember that the purpose of collaboration is not simply for the sake of form or fashion--that is, not simply because collaborative learning looks better or feels more modern. The purpose is to create the optimal conditions for learning. Of course, as teachers, once we do establish the best conditions, we still have to utilize our knowledge of the target language and language acquisition processes, and our skills in selection of materials, task design and feedback in order to be truly effective teachers. But a lot of our success does depend on creating the right conditions for learning.
The downside to attempting to use collaboration is that there are several obstacles, any one of which can break our will to continue. First is the culture factor. Having worked in classrooms from Togo to Thailand, I know there are cultural obstacles to promoting collaborative learning in virtually any context. It always seems easier to go along with the dominant cultural style of education, which nearly always translates to some form of teacher-led instruction, emphasizing the teacher's responsibilities for impressing, entertaining, inspiring, illuminating, and supervising students. We almost always have to find some way to adjust our expectations about how much can be achieved, how fast, and how much support we need to offer students as they try new ways of learning. Even as we address cultural obstacles, we will encounter other practical impediments: difficulties in identifying out-of-class language learning opportunities in EFL settings, difficulties in providing focused feedback to students on how well they are succeeding in out-of-class endeavors, difficulties in linking out-of-class learning with in-class learning. Though any of these impediments can frustrate us, when we are aware of the likely obstacles in advance, we have a better chance of dealing with them.
The upside to attempting to use collaboration is that we can find numerous success stories to motivate us to keep trying. In Japan, I have worked with both native and nonnative speaker English teachers who report amazing successes with collaborative learning ideas: project-based curriculums, self-access media centers, online chat rooms, live chat rooms, English telephone study groups, hobby clubs, learning journals, student-published newsletters, and hybrid internet/classroom courses. Indeed, it is through working with teachers like these that I begin to understand the possibilities and the promises of collaborative learning.
References
Benson, P. (2001). Autonomy in language learning. London: Longman.
Benson, P., & Voller, P. (Eds.). (1997). Autonomy and independence in language learning. London: Longman.
Cotteral, S. (1999). Key variables in language learning: What do learners believe about them? System, 27, 593-613.
Dickinson, L. (1987). Self-instruction in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, D., & Miller, L. (1999). Establishing self-access: From theory to practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kagan, S. (1985). The dimensions of cooperative classroom structures. In R. Slavin, S. Sharan, & S. Kagan, et al. (Eds.), Learning to cooperate, cooperating to learn. New York: Plenum.
Rubin, J. (1975). What the "good language learner" can teach us. TESOL Quarterly, 9, 41-51.
Slavin, R. (1980). Cooperative learning. Review of Educational Research, 50, 315-342.
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