穨Review. Pdf

Together in this study included (1) listening to the tape and drawing the content in 
groups, (2) group summarizing of teacher’s lecture, (3) group production and 
presentation of vocabulary cards, and (4) group song making and singing. Through 
the method of Learning Together, students were used to perceiving that they could 
reach their learning goals only if the other students in the learning group also did so.
There was a built-in concern for the common good and the success of others, as 
the efforts of others also contributed to one’s own well-being. This inherent value of 
commitment to the common goal was displayed in the experimental group’s effort to 

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remind their partners’ lines so that they could complete their task, as shown in Table 
4.12. There were five students in the experimental group who tried to remind their 
partners what to say while there was only one in the control group that demonstrated 
effort to rescue their partner when communication breakdown occurred. Apparently, 
the participants in the experimental group had acquired the cooperative skills that 
endowed them to find ways to promote, facilitate, and encourage the efforts of others.
With this inherent value of commitment to common goals, the participants who 
caused silence due to their own fault in the experimental group still hunted for ways 
to fix or repair the embarrassing silence by smiling, apologizing, or at least by 
maintaining eye contact, as illustrated in Table 4.13. Though unable to do anything 
verbally, they still tried to keep the communication open by other non-verbal 
strategies like smile and eye contact.
Moreover, the positive reaction to communication breakdown also showed that 
cooperative learning contributed to enhance the students’ accuracy of perspective 
taking. Social perspective taking is the ability to understand how a situation appears 
to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the 
situation (Johnson & Johnson, 1989a). Cooperative learning experiences here 
seemed to promote greater cognitive and affective perspective taking in the 
experimental group than did competitive or traditional learning experiences in the 
control group.
The opposite of perspective taking is egocentrism, the embeddedness in one’s 
own viewpoint to the extent that one is unaware of others’ points of view and of the 
limitations of one’s perspectives (Johnson & Johnson, 1989a). As a sharp contrast to 
the cooperative behaviors of the experimental group, the control group displayed the 
egocentrism to a great extent.
The control group, taught in the traditional method, tended to quit the task when 

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they encountered communication breakdown. Six people out of ten simply dropped 
the whole task when silence occurred during their partners’ turns, as shown in Table 
4.12. Little sign of effort to repair the communication could be traced in the control 
group. It seemed that these students were not in the habit of facilitating and 
encouraging others, in order to complete a common task together.
More evidence showed in how the participants in the control group reacted to 
their own silence: six participants completely avoided further contact with their 
partners by looking at their own feet instead of their partner’s eye, as illustrated in 
Table 4.13. This kind of avoiding attitude and inability to fix one’s silence could be 
attributed to the traditional teacher-centered classroom. Students in the 
teacher-centered classroom tended to be passive recipients without much training and 
opportunities to solve problems on their own. As a result, whenever some 
unexpected problems occurred during their conversation, like the communication 
breakdown during their oral task, most of them did not know what to do. 
The resigning attitude might be possibly caused by the passive and competitive 
learning climate, which was dominant in most traditional classrooms. When a 
situation was structured competitively, there was no correlation among participants’ 
goal attainments (Johnson & Johnson, 1989). Each individual perceived that he or 
she could reach his or her goal regardless of whether other individuals had attained 
their goals or not. Thus, students tended to seek an outcome that was personally 
beneficial without concerns for others.
Students exposed to the traditional instructional method might also learn to value 
the commitment to one’s own self-interest and ignore others’ success. Because 
cooperation was not taught and encouraged, one’s own success was viewed important 
while others’ achievements was considered irrelevant and sometimes threatening.
There was a built-in self-centeredness while ignoring the plight of others (Johnson & 

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Johnson, 1989). Because these students in the control group perceived that success 
was independent of others’ contribution, they were not ready or not in the habit of 
helping when their partners were in need of them to complete their oral task.
Being unable to help out when their partners were in need, the students in the 
control group were also unable to fix their own silence. According to Table 4.13, 
only one student in the control group was able to smile and say “I am sorry,” while six 
in the experimental group managed to reduce the embarrassment by smiling and 
saying “I am sorry.” This also indicated that the teacher-centered instructional 
method did not bestow students with the problem solving ability that is highly valued 
in the current wave of education reform in Taiwan.
Such findings of the resigning attitudes demonstrated in the control group, as 
illustrated in Table 4.13, echoed Wei (1997)’s observation of college students in 
Taiwan. According to Wei (1997), college students are becoming more and more 
ego-centered and selfish without knowing how to get along with peers and work 
harmoniously with others due to an extremely competitive and defensive educational 
surrounding in Taiwan. The point is, the college students whom Wei (1997) 
observed could not possibly become self-centered due to college education. The 
problem of such undesirable behaviors identified in these college students must have 
rooted when they were as young as junior high school students, or perhaps even 
younger. If the purpose of education is to cultivate our students as whole persons 
with the ability to care, share, respect, communicate, and cooperate, as suggested in 
the Guidelines of NYJC, then, cooperative learning seems to be a better strategy than 
the traditional teaching method and should be considered to be implemented since 
elementary school.
As for the students’ academic achievements in the monthly examinations, the 
results might be a relief for many teachers who were worried that cooperative learning 

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may hinder the students’ progress in structure-based examinations. As shown in 
Table 4.15, the experiment of cooperative learning in Sunny Junior High School 
English course, however, did not show any decrease of the students’ academic 
achievements in the school-wide monthly examinations. As a matter of fact, the 
experimental group performed slightly better than the control group in the school 
monthly examinations. This may prove that CL is not biased toward oral 
communication; it takes care of the four language skills as well as the grammatical 
competence. 
Though the experimental group did not achieve significant gains in the 
achievement tests, they did perform significantly better in the analysis of the five 
grading criteria of the linguistic competence (appropriateness, vocabulary, grammar, 
intelligibility, and fluency), as illustrated in Table 4.9. In the inter-group 
comparisons on these five items in the post-oral task, the experimental group achieved 
significant gains (p < .05) on the grading items of (1) appropriateness, (2) vocabulary, 
(3) grammar, and (4) intelligibility. The only item that did not gain significantly was 
fluency, as shown in Table 4.9. The control group, taught in Grammar Translation, 
should have performed significantly better than the experimental group on the item of 
grammar. But the results of the analysis did not show such prediction, as illustrated 
in Table 4.9. 
The possible reason to account for the insignificant difference on the item of 
fluency between the two groups was perhaps due to the silence occurred during the 
students’ performance. According to the scoring rubric (Appendix E), fluency was 
graded mainly based upon the continuity of the students’ utterances without halting 
and incoherent fragments. When communication breakdown occurred, the scores for 
fluency would be largely reduced. As there were eight occurrences of silence in the 
experimental group and 10 in the control group, the scores of fluency between the two 

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groups were then not significant. However, some linguistic behaviors were difficult 
to identify with the scoring rubric. Therefore, the method of content analysis was 
needed for further investigation on how the students fixed or repaired the 
communication breakdown, as illustrated in Table 4.12 and Table 4.13. Examining 
communicative competence from the strategic perspective, the experimental group 
performed more satisfactorily than the control group. Discussions of the strategic 
competence were already presented previously.
In sum, the experimental group gained significantly in the four aspects of the 
communicative competence and in the mean time, still maintained similar academic 
achievements as the control group in the form-focused monthly examinations. With 
such results, cooperative learning deserves mo re attention to be the enactment of the 
communicative approach in the current wave of educational reform in Taiwan.