Selection and evaluation of the teaching materials for developing environmental awareness in all classrooms Contents Introduction Chapter I. Class as a social group and its atmosphere

Participation. In order to have a good cooperation in a group it is important for the members to contribute and participate somewhat equally so everyone has a chance to practice their language skills and therefore improve. According to Hadfield equal participation also plays a significant role in learner’s individual motivation to cooperate and be active during lessons as well as in the process of maintaining or establishing a cohesive group.
Some group members differ a lot in terms of their participation in the lesson usually due to their personality, their temper and communicativeness or due to their level of language confidence.
To encourage shy students to participate more or overly active students to realize they should give other people a chance to express themselves a teacher should choose activities which wouldn’t cause active students to loose enthusiasm and shy students feel too much pressure. To mention an example of such an activity the well know taking turns by passing or throwing of a soft ball during discussions is according on my experience rather effective.
Territoriality. The term “territoriality” refers to a phenomenon for which is typical that a group of people is composed of smaller groups that are separated from each other often both physically in terms of their seating as well as psychologically sustaining friendships only within their little group often referred to as a clique.
These groups usually want to cooperate only with people from their clique and may dislike or even refuse to work with others. Who explains that this is not only disadvantageous for the group cohesiveness but also for the language learning it self as people who work together or speak together too often develop a certain code, using the same vocabulary and phrases and often end up quite soon knowing everything about each other which leads them to boring artificial discussions or dialogues .It is preferable to prevent territoriality and clique formation from the very beginning of a group existence because cliques once established are not easy to overcome, however, with the use of some fun activities and games, which she introduces in her book called Classroom Dynamics, a teacher can improve the cohesion of a group reorganizing learners into new groups or pairs indirectly and tactfully, in a fun way, without them feeling pressured.