Cooperative Learning: Context and Opportunities for Acquiring Academic English

Abstract

This article explores how the Learning Together form of cooperative learning influenced opportunities for acquiring academic English by L2 learners in a 6th-grade social studies classroom. Our findings present a complex picture. Cooperative learning gave L2 learners a wide range of opportunities to acquire academic English. They gave and received help with academic terms, difficult academic concepts, and para-academic knowledge. They were exposed to and produced lexical and conceptual explorations and homonymic word associations. They received help with conventions of written English. They used language for self-help and were invited by their peers to contribute more to the group. Many of these categories included both input and output opportunities, with L2 learners helping others as much as they were helped. However, except for help with decoding academic terms, the various kinds of opportunities occurred relatively infrequently. Moreover, there were some missed opportunities and some negative input. Several local contextual features (e.g., students' definitions of the task, features of the task, and participant structures) helped us understand the complex picture we found. Our findings suggest that (a) developers and disseminators need to take context into account, and (b) teachers who want to maximize the benefits of cooperative learning in support of second language acquisition (SLA) need to have a broad understanding of academic language, include SLA in their instructional goals, structure classroom tasks to support the desired opportunities for L2 learners, monitor what is happening in the groups, and fine tune their implementation if they are not getting what they want.