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Cooperative Strategy Training and Oral Interaction: Enhancing Small Group Communication in the Language Classroom
Author(s) -
NAUGHTON DIANE
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
the modern language journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.486
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1540-4781
pISSN - 0026-7902
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2006.00391.x
Subject(s) - task (project management) , psychology , sociocultural evolution , control (management) , intervention (counseling) , language acquisition , cooperative learning , second language acquisition , mathematics education , computer science , teaching method , linguistics , management , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , sociology , anthropology , economics , philosophy
This study focused on the effect of a cooperative strategy training program on the patterns of interaction that arose as small groups of students participated in an oral discussion task. The underlying assumption was that students could be taught to engage with each other and with the task in a way that would foster the creation and exploitation of learning opportunities. Intact classes were randomly assigned to the experimental or control condition, and triads from within each group were videotaped at the beginning and end of the experimental intervention. Data taken from the videotapes were analyzed in order to measure changes in overall participation, strategic participation, and the use of the individual strategies included in the program. The pretest showed that prior to strategy training, interaction patterns frequently did not reflect those interactions deemed important for language acquisition as identified within both traditional second language acquisition (SLA) and sociocultural research. The posttest revealed, however, that the strategy training program was largely successful in encouraging students to engage in these types of interactional sequences.