穨Review. Pdf

3.1 Selection of Participants 
The selection of the participants included (1) the selection of one teacher, Ms. 
Lee, who had gone through a 40-hour workshop in cooperative learning and (2) two 
classes of EFL first year junior high school students taught by Ms. Lee.
3.1.1 Selection of Teacher 
Teacher readiness in cooperative learning could be a vital variable that might 
affect the outcome of a given study examining the effects of cooperative learning on 

---

56
students, as Yu (1995) and Chu (1996) claimed in their studies. For this reason, the 
researcher started to offer a 40-hour workshop for 12 English teachers at Sunny Junior 
High School
5
from September 1999 to June 2000, before investigating the effects of 
cooperative learning on EFL learners’ language learning in 2001.
All of the 12 participants in the training were female English teachers teaching at 
Sunny Junior High School who were interested in cooperative learning. The training 
consisted of twenty sessions (Appendix A) of meeting scheduled on every other 
Wednesday afternoons from the beginning of the fall semester 1999 to the end of the 
spring semester of 2000. Each session lasted for two hours. The training took 
place in the meeting room at Sunny Junior High School.
Following the 40-hour workshop, the researcher paid weekly visit to Sunny 
Junior High School to observe the participants’ teaching in real life classroom setting 
for one semester. The time and date of the classroom observation were arranged in 
advance so that all of the teachers from the workshop could join the researcher to 
observe their colleagues’ teaching. Followed by each classroom observation, there 
was a one-hour discussion for all of the teachers and the researcher to reflect and 
comment on the teaching observed in the previous hour.
Because Ms. Lee demonstrated higher achievement using cooperative learning in 
peer teaching during the workshop, the participants wanted to observe more of her 
classroom teaching in her class. Therefore, Ms. Lee was scheduled for classroom 
observation for five times during that semester. The class we observed in Ms. Lee’s 
teaching was a third year class at Sunny Junior High School, whom most teachers 
considered difficult to teach. According to the researcher evaluation, the peer 
evaluation, and the discussion after the classroom observation, Ms. Lee was identified 
5
Sunny Junior High School was the pseudo name given to the junior high school where this study was 
carried out by the researcher.

---

57
as the most successful teacher for the following reasons: 
1. 
The first reason was her ability to integrate cooperative learning with 
the teaching of the four language skills. She used cooperative 
learning in the teaching of the four language skills in listening, 
speaking, reading, and writing throughout the semester after 
completing the 40-hour workshop in cooperative learning. The other