Cooperative Learning shares a lot of characteristics with communicative language teaching in which interaction between students and communicative and speaking skills are regarded as the key concepts and teacher’s role is just as facilitator and guider. Students interact with each other in an environment with law stress and high autonomy that also allows promoting personal responsibility and social relations among them.
There are 5 key components of Cooperative Learning that differentiate it from other methods:
1. Positive interdependence: it refers to the fact that students should work together in order to achieve the goal. In this case they can also learn from each other.
2. Individual accountability: each member is responsible for the group success and responsible for their own learning.
3. Promotive interactions: it refers to the students’ interactions to achieve the goal. They interact verbally in a group that can also results in their own learning of speaking and communicative skills.
4. Interpersonal and social skills: constructive feedback that students receive in a group can help them build their interpersonal and social skills.
5. Group processing: it requires group members to assess their functions in a group with the focus on positive behavior and actions.
5. Aims of Cooperative Learning
Aims of Cooperative Learning can be summarized as:
1. Academic Learning: Cooperative Learning can help learners learn academically. (Cohen, 1994) learners will also develop