穨Review. Pdf

3.2.2.4 Learning Together (LT) 
The most common form of LT in this class occurred in the form of group 
summary. Usually right after one activity, the teacher would ask the students to 
recall what they just learned in their groups. Allowing time for students to work 
with someone else every twenty minutes or so during class period would help keep 
students on task. Besides, talking about what they had learned to their group 
members helped a lot in their comprehension and retention of the materials learned.
Most important, through the retelling, Ms. Lee was able to pinpoint and correct 
students’ misunderstandings and misconceptions that were otherwise difficult to 
detect in teacher-centered whole class instruction.
The LT method was well organized and controlled so that each of the group 
members had the chance to talk and to explore the cooperative skills. Before they 
started, Ms. Lee reminded them of the following principles to enforce positive 
interdependence and individual accountability: 
l When disagreeing with someone in the group, react in a 

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non-judgmental and polite way. Use expressions
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like “In my 
opinion, I happen to see things differently. You are welcome to 
correct me if I am wrong” before bringing up disagreement. 
l When reacting to someone’s disagreement, try to show gratitude by 
saying “Thank you very much for your precious opinion. I will 
reconsider mine again carefully.” 
l When appealing to someone’s idea, do not hesitate to show 
appreciation by saying, “This idea is fantastic! Marvelous! I love 
it!” 
l Try to learn something from others’ differences. If not, at least 
respect their rights to be different. 
After explaining these principles, Ms. Lee gave one situation of disagreement 
and asked the students to practice those expressions with their Talk-Pairs until they 
got the feelings and were used to saying them without feeling embarrassed
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. During 
this exercise, Ms. Lee also reminded them of other non-verbal techniques of 
communication like smile, eye contact, nodding head to show approval and other 
body postures to express attentive listening.
In almost every LT activity, the leader from each group was authorized to 
appoint any student from the same group to share his/her class notes or answers on 
any given worksheet orally. The checker double-checked if the assigned student’s 
understanding was correct. If any disagreement occurred, other members would join 
the discussion. If the group members could not reach an agreement on their own, the 
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Ms. Lee taught the students these sentences in English first, making them part of the classroom 
English. Other than the expressions, the rest of the principles were delivered in Chinese. 
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Some of the teenagers were not used to saying things nicely to their classmates. They expressed 
almost everything in negative ways. Therefore, they needed to practice with their Talk-Pairs until 
they got used to these expressions. 

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leader would assign a representative to ask for help from other groups. The teacher 
only intervened when all the students had tried but failed to solve the problems. In 
the long run, students began to assume their responsibility as active learners as well as 
problem solvers instead of passive recipients of knowledge. 
The LT method sometimes could be an aid to foster active and attentive listening 
skills when Ms. Lee played the cassette of the dialogues in the textbooks. Most of 
the teachers in traditional classroom would simp ly ask their students to repeat after 
the tape individually while reading the dialogue, if they played the tape at all.
However, in a cooperative learning context, even a simple task like playing the 
cassette is carefully structured to achieve the maximal learning effect. 
Ms. Lee usually started a new lesson by playing the audiotape first. She would 
ask the students to close their eyes and their books while listening to the tape and 
imagine what happened. After they heard it for the first time, they told their 
Talk-Pair what they had heard. Interaction with their peers after listening helped a 
lot to increase their comprehension and attention on the listening task. If the teacher 
just asked the students to listen without any interaction, sometimes the activity would 
end up being passive listening with little comprehension. 
Before playing the tape for the second time, each of the students would get a 
worksheet on cloze prepared by Ms. Lee. The blanks on the worksheet were not 
deleted at random. They were all words students learned before. This was a good 
warm up activity because the new information was based on old information.
When the students got the worksheets, they tried to guess the answers and double 
checked with their partners. The cloze was a powerful tool to encourage students to 
guess and anticipate what would normally appear in a given context. If they were 
used to predicting or expecting, their ability in listening and reading would be greatly 
enhanced. 

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When all groups were ready, Ms. Lee then played the tape for the second time 
with pause on words that were missing in the worksheet. After listening to the tape 
for the second time, the students started to correct their guessing from the first 
listening. Then they had three minutes to discuss their answers and checked the 
spellings in groups. Confusions and all kinds of different answers would surface.
After the group discussion, Ms. Lee would play the tape again for the third time, 
also with pause on the missing words as a device to attract attention. After the third 
time, Ms. Lee asked each group to send a representative to write the answers on the 
blackboard. Ms. Lee checked if students got all the correct answers. 
Depending on the nature of a learning task, the LT method sometimes appeared 
in the form of group song making. As a way to review and mastery learning of the 
materials learned, Ms. Lee would give the students the melody and asked each group 
to find lyrics for the assigned melody. They could pick up any sentences from the 
book or make up their own to complete the song. After 10 to 15 minutes, each group 
came to the front and sang the song they just created, based on the words or sentences 
they had learned in class.
Through the method of Learning Together, the students in the experimental 
group got themselves familiarized with the necessary skills that were vital to 
successful cooperative learning: listening, paraphrasing, active participation, attention 
on task, willingness to share, giving and responding to disagreements politely, and 
exploring and learning in a non-threatening context of their own groups.