Full Paper @ ICCS 12Nov

DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL SKILLS

THROUGH COOPERATIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Dian Misesani

Nusa Nipa University of Maumere

E-mail : dianmisesani@gmail.com

Abstract

The cooperative learning method, particularly STAD technique and a Set-Criteria project activity, was implemented to a tenth grade class of tourism vocation at SMKK Mater Amabilis to foster their writing and speaking skills. Those productive language skills are crucial to be mastered by students of tourism vocation as to prepare into the business world. In groups of four, the students tasks were to write a descriptive text on blogs about Indonesia’s tourist destinations and to perform their speaking skill approaching to tour guides. This was a pre-experimental design which comprises only one group pretest-posttest. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effetiveness of cooperative learning method in increasing students writing and speaking skills. The research instrument were students’ writing and speaking performance tasks before and after cooperative learning implementation. The data were analyzed by using paired samples T-test of SPSS-20. The paired sample correlation showed that there are correlations at 45% in writing skill and 24% in speaking skill. The two-tailed paired sample t-test resulted sig ≤ 0.05 which means there is significant difference between both writing and speaking skill before and after cooperative learning implemented. In conclusion, this research contributed to the English teaching that cooperative learning method can be one of the appropriate solutions to solve some problems related to teaching writing and speaking. Further, the finding showed a development of students’ social skill through the implementation of cooperative learning as resulted in their succesful team-work writing on blog.

Keywords: cooperative learning, productive language skills, social skill

INTRODUCTION

John Dewey, one of the most influential educators and philosopher of the early twentieth century, proposed that by interacting with others, children receive feedback on their activities, they learn socially appropriate behaviors, and they understand what is involved in cooperating and working together (Dewey as cited in R.M. et.al. Gillies (2003, p. 1)). In other words he believed that education is a process of living and that schools had a responsibility to capture children’s interests, to expand and develop their expectations, and assist them in responding appropriately to new ideas and influences. Therefore, education should not only provide and facilitate learning but also teaches students with social skill.

Conventionally, English classes were rather teacher-centered and probably did not contribute to students’ motivation and communication to obtain English language learning. Needles to say, the little communication and interaction between students and teachers in the classroom was difficult to enhance students’ English proficiency which is very important for the workforce needs in the future. The learning outcomes of SMKK Mater Amabilis vacationing in tourism program is to provide students who are able to implement such knowledge and skills majoring in tourism that leads them to successfully pursue professional business in tourism. However, after a two-week observation, the researcher found out that the students of UPW-1 did not get along well either inside or outside the classroom. They were making groups with classmates from the same junior school. This situation had made the learning interest is low and the researcher assumed that this would bring negative affect their learning process. Thus, to provide students’ learning interest, proficiency, and practical  learning in English language particularly writing and speaking skills, the researcher aimed to implement the cooperative learning which seems to be a good way to facilitate students’ interaction. As reported by Slavin R. E. Slavin (1991a), cooperative learning has been viewed as the solution for educational problems: it can foster students’ academic achievement and thinking skills, enhance positive learning attitudes  and  learning  motivation,  increase  higher-order  learning,  serve  as  an  alternative  to  grouping, remediation, or special education, improve interpersonal relations, and prepare students for collaborative work.

The previous study conducted by Nurhasanah (2016) on Teaching Reading Comprehension Using STAD to The Students in Grade VIII at SMPN 3 Cipeucang proved that ‘STAD offers more fun to the learning process in the classroom between the students to help each other in learning the lesson material to the learning.’ The research gap is in the objectives of the study which the previous study investigate the effectiveness of STAD implementation on reading comprehension, whereas the current aimed to implement STAD to develop students writing and speaking skills, also students social skill.

This research aims to investigate: (1) are there any increases in students’ writing and speaking skills after the cooperative learning implemented as showed by the mean score? ; (2) are there any significant differents between students’ writing and speaking skills before cooperative learning implemented and those after? ; (3) How is the positive impact of cooperative learning implementation to students’ social skills development?

LITERATURE REVIEW

A.      Cooperative Learning

The cooperative learning’s characteristic can be recognized by its requirement that students have to ‘work together in small groups to support each other to improve their own learning and that of others’ (Jollifee, 2007, p. 3). According to Johnson et.al. (as cited in Robyn M. et al Gillies, 2008), cooperative larning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning. Therefore, in order to engage students in learning, five essential elements must be present in the cooperative learning classroom i.e.:

1)      Positive interdependence; Team members are obliged to rely on one another to achieve the goal. If any team members fail to do their part, everyone suffers consequences. Group members have to know that they sink or swim together.

2)      Individual accountability; All students in a group are held accountable for doing their share of the work and for mastery of all of the material to be learned

3)      Face-to-face promotive interaction; Although some of the group work may be tracted- out and done individually, some must be done interactively, with group members providing one another with feedback, challenging reasoning and conclusions, and perhaps  most importantly, teaching and encouraging one another.

4)      Interpersonal and social skills are the fourth essential element of cooperative learning. Interpersonal and social skills to help students cooperate effectively in the group. Group members must have, or be taught, the interpersonal and social skills needed for high quality cooperation, and be motivated to use them. To coordinate efforts to achieve mutual goals, participants must: (a) get to know and trust each other; (b) communicate accurately and unambiguously; (c) accept and support each other; and (d) resolve conflicts constructively (Johnson & Johnson as cited in Tran (2013, p. 103)).

5)      Group processing; Team members set group goals, periodically assess what they are doing well as a team, and identify changes they will make to function more effectively in the future. However, in this research, the goal was set up by the researcher.

B.       Students-Team-Achievement-Division and Set Criteria–Project Activity. 

STAD is one of cooperative learning techniques which has five major components such as classroom presentations, teamwork, quizzes, individual improvement scores and team recognition. According to R. Slavin, Sharan, Kagan et.al (1985, p. 7), these are the steps of STAD’s five major components: 1) the teacher presents a lesson, 2) the students meet in four to five member teams to master a set of worksheets on the lesson, 3) each student takes a quiz on the material, 4) students quiz scores are compared to their past average. The students earn points for their teams based on how much their scores could exceed their previous quizzes. When students make progress  on  their  quizzes,  the  whole  group’s  performance  will  be  improved, 5) if students’ average scores exceed a certain criterion, teams can learn certificates or other rewards.

However, the researcher combined the STAD technique with Set Criteria – Project as one of cooperative learning group activities suggested by MacPershon (2007, p. 159) which purpose is ‘to ensure that the participants have a clear picture of what is required to complete a project or exercise successfully’.  The equipment she employed is giving project information and guidance to form reasonable criteria on the project as done in the second meeting.

           

C.      Teaching Productive Language Skills

Positively, English teachers would agree with the idea that people are activating and producing language when they speak or write. However, whether people are speaking or writing, they often associate what they are doing with other skills. According to Eli Hinkel opinion,’in meaningful communication, people employ incremental language skills not in isolation, but in tandem’(Hinkel as cited in Harmer (2007, p. 265)). Further, Burn and Joyce say that one of the aims of most language program used by today’s teachers is to develop spoken language skills, and most program aim to integrate both spoken and written language (Burns, 1997, pp. 54-55). Therefore, it makes sense to integrate different skills that the researcher aimed to replicate the natural processes of skill-mixing to provide students maximum learning opportunities.

There are two basic types of speaking skill according to David Nunan, those are (planned and unplanned) monologue and (unfamiliar/familiar interpersonal and unfamiliar/familiar transactional) dialogue where the ability to give an uninterrupted oral presentation is quite distinct from interacting with one or more other speakers for transactional and interactional purposes (as cited in Brown (2000, p. 251)). In everyday social communication there can be definitely comprises elements of interpersonal dialogues and vice versa. It is an on-going and complex process of acquiring knowledge and developing skills and strategies to interact with people in social situations.

Under the circumstances, one of the tourism students’ competencies is to be a tour guide who can interact with either domestic or foreign tourists and explain the tourist destinations. The planned monologue was one of the proficiencies they had to practice. As Harmer said that ‘skill integration also happens when students are involved in project work, which may well involve researching (through reading or listening), speaking (e.g. in discussion or when giving presentation) and writing (e.g. submitting a report)….’ Harmer (2007, p. 267). Therefore, based on writing-on-blog project, students should practice their speaking skill as if they were tour guides who describe destinations to some tourists. One group act as tour guides and others act as tourists who ask questions so there were also interactions among students.

By means of written text, a student can communicate with other people in addition to the spoken language which have to meet people in face-to-face situation. However, the students written text and spoken language are different related to their cognitive processes, especially when learning second language. Because of the need for accuracy in writing, the mental process of the students when writing is differ significantly from their  mental process when doing spoken communication (Harmer, 2004, p. 31). Students mostly have more time to think in writing than in speaking, because they can express almost all that they have in their minds, and also consult dictionaries, grammar books, or any other reference for the perfection of their writing. Therefore, practice and study of writing are significant parts of the school curriculum.

In teaching of descriptive writing,  the researcher focus on the product of students writing by following the writing process such as; drafting and editing which also related to teaching students the aim, the organization and generic structure of descriptive writing. Based on the text book of curriculum 2013, descriptive text is the most writing type to be taught as can be found in chapter 5 describing people, chapter 6-7 describing tourist destination, chapter 8 describing historical places (Kemendikbud, 2014, pp. 55-93). The students’ descriptive writing can be seen by public because the writing is uploaded in a blog.

D.      Social skill

Social skills are different things from behavior. They are more like components of behavior which help an individual to understand and adapt through a variety of social settings. Walker (1983, p. 27) defines social skills as, a) a set of competencies that allow an individual to initiate and maintain positive social relationship, b) contribute to peer acceptance and to a satisfactory school adjustment, and c) allow an individual to cope effectively with the larger social environment. In addition, the social learning theory connects to cognitive and behavior learning theories, which also emphasize the central role

of social learning by taking into account how imitable behaviors are affected by cognitive constructs, such as attention, retention,  and  motivation  (Johnson  et  al.,  2010 – as cited in Tran (2013, p. 109)). By means of these theoretical perspectives, the researcher sought to evaluate as well as build students’ social skills within the context of English language education.

METHODOLOGY

Pre-experimental design was employed in this research, which according to Salkind is called as the one group pretest-postest design. The steps are: 1) participants are assigned to one group, 2) a pretest is administered, 3) a treatment is administered, 4) a posttest is administered (Salkind, 2012, p. 231). However, this design was blended with STAD technique of cooperative learning method in the reason that there is similar in terms of group’s pretest step.

There were twenty tenth grade students majoring in tourism participated in the research conducted at Mater Amabilis Vocational High School of Surabaya.

The researcher decided that the succes of this research would be gained if students’ mean score were equal or higher than 80.00 respectively. The data analysis also supported by SPSS 20 statistic program to measure the significant level of mean differences to equally or lesser than ≤ 0.05.

The teaching material used by the researcher is the English Book for X grade students based on K-13 as published by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia. Particularly, chapter 6 and 7 were chosen in the reason that they are in relation with tourist destination and descriptive text. The warmer quiz was taken from chapter 6, whereas the vocabulary and grammar exercises were taken from both chapter 6 and 7 as implemented in the first meeting.

In the first meeting, on 5th of September, a class presentation was given by the researcher related to lesson materials and set the project criteria. Further, three quizzes were given individually i.e. grammar review, writing a short descriptive text, and speaking. The ‘quizzes’ were scored to classify the students’ language knowledge, writing and speaking skills from which groups were made. Afterwards, teamworks consist of four students were assigned in heterogeneous teams according to the result of the quizzes. These quizzes scores in STAD technique were considered as ‘pretest’.

In the second meeting, on 6th of September, group members rearranged their chairs to face each other in groups on the purpose that such a seating arrangement would help members to discuss and to strengthen group positive interdependence. The researcher gave project information, samples, and guidance to form reasonable criteria of the project assigned. Students must fully participate and put forth effort within their groups to design the project as assigned by the researcher. They were allowed to discuss the project using both languages; Indonesian and English. This was the stage for students to collaborate their academic and social skills within their groups by deciding the tourist destination, making a draft for descriptive text, and designing the blog altogether. The drafts were assigned to the researcher to be examined nearly to the end of this second meeting. Afterwards each group should develop their draft into a complete descriptive text and write it on the blog has been designed without the researcher’s supervision.

The third meeting was on 12th of September, this was when each group has completed the writing-on-blog-project and was given feedback and evaluation by the researcher. From the feedback and evaluation, each group should correct their writing as been told. The researcher also conducted ‘questions-answers’ session in English only during the feedback and evaluation.

 The fourth meeting, on 13th of September, each group performed their speaking skill based on their descriptive writing. Scoring was done and the recognition of the team carried out the reward for the efforts that have been made during the project.

In assessing students’ writing skill, the researcher used five criteria, i.e. 1) cohesion, 2) coherence, 3) grammar, 4) vocabulary, and 5) content. Whereas in assessing students’ speaking skill, the criteria were 1) pronunciation, 2) grammar, 3) fluency, 4) vocabulary, and 5) comprehension of content.

There were two types of grading activity the researcher took to assess students’ social skills development, i.e. peer-teacher assessments and end-product assessment. The measurement of peer-teacher assessments used were those referred to sub-chapter II.1 point 4. The measurement of end-product assessment were actually related to the students’ writing project in blog which comprised of 1) originality, 2) creativity, 3) time, and 4) members participation.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The paired samples statistics result as seen in table 1 below shows that there are increases in speaking and writing skills’ mean scores. The writing mean score increases from 61.50 to 85.05 after the cooperative learning implemented, whereas the speaking mean score increases from 68.00 to 80.00. Further, table 2 shows that there are correlation between the writing pretest and posttest, also between speaking pretest and posttest, after the treatment using cooperative learning method. The correlation (r) column resulted 0.668 for writing and 0.491 for speaking, to which if ‘r’ is squared, the result shows the cooperative learning role in increasing writing skills is 45% and 24% in speaking. At last, table 3 shows the mean differences before and after the cooperative learning implementation. The 2-tailed sig column resulted equal or less than ( ≤ ) 0.05 which mean that there are significant differences at level 5% and therefore the hypotheses are accepted. In other words the cooperative learning implementation in this research is effective for gaining students improvement in writing and speaking scores respectively.

Table 1: Paired Samples Statistics

		Mean	N	Std. Deviation	Std. Error Mean
Pair 1	Writing Pretest	61.5000	20	8.28759	1.85316
	Writing Posttest	85.0500	20	2.74293	.61334
Pair 2	Speaking Pretest	68.0000	20	5.47723	1.22474
	Speaking Posttest	80.0000	20	5.38028	1.20307

Table 2: Paired Samples Correlation

		N	Correlation	Sig.
Pair 1	Writing Pretest &	20	.668	.001
	Writing Posttest
Pair 2	Speaking Pretest &	20	.491	.028
	Speaking Posttest

Table 3: T-Test Paired Samples

	Paired Differences
	Mean	Std. Deviation	Std. Error Mean	95% Confidence Interval of the Difference		t	df	Sig.(2-tailed)
				Lower	Upper
Pair 1
Writing Pretest -	-23.55000	6.77049	1.51393	-26.71868	-20.38132	-15.556	19	.000*
Writing Posttest
Pair 2
Speaking Pretest -	-12.00000	5.47723	1.22474	-14.56342	-9.43658	-9.798	19	.000*
Speaking Posttest

*significance-level ≤ 0.05 = there is significant difference at 5%

Most of students were enthusiastic to accomplish the project in their each groups because the topic was about tourist destination which engaged to their vocation. Moreover, they had never been given such written task on blog before that they felt it was fun and challenging project. But when groups were assigned in the first meeting, there was a student named ‘A’ who was good in grammar and speaking but could not get along with his friend in the team. The researscher and the teacher caught him in his silent action and took such distant seat from other members. Seeing this situation, the researcher asked all students whether they were feel comfortable with their groups or not in the reason that the success of the project depended on how they could cooperate each other in colaborative learning. Soon, he raised his hand and asked the researcher to switch to another group, in which there was his friend since junior school. The researcher, then, allowed him to do as he wanted in the reason that he could not learn anything or put effort to cooperate if he assigned to the group that he did not want to join with.

In opening the second meeting, the researcher clearly stated the instructional objectives and behavioral expectation throughout the lesson to accomplish the project. Further, she simulated ‘real life’ challenges students may encounter at school, home, and in the community to place social skills in their practical context. Afterwards, the researcher observed that about almost first ten minutes in group work activities, ‘A’ did not show any progress in his attitude problems. But then ‘B’, one member of the group who happened to be ‘A’’s friend in junior school, initiated talking to him and started their discussion about the writing task. ‘B’ made good communication in both Indonesian and English and could get along well with all classmates. Finally, ‘A’ came across really well in interaction within members of group ‘4’, like members from other groups did.

At the time students’ project were presented to the class, all groups performed in such harmony when they spoke in front of the class. Every member in groups comprehended the content of text, knew they part in speaking performance, and answered questions from other groups confidently.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION

The researcher had found all provided rational and reasonable support to the advantage of cooperative learning. Each of the findings contributes an evaluation of cooperative learning in terms of developing language and social skills. The increase of writing skill’s mean score after the cooperative learning implemented had proved the important role of reciprocal interaction among members in constructing descriptive writing and uploaded on blog. The increase of speaking skill’s mean score is also as one of the good result of cooperative learning. Previously, students performed speaking with random topics which seemed to be easy for them since they chose their own topics, but then they made many pauses in the middle of speaking performance. But when the speaking topic was preset and it was meaningfully engaged to their tourism vocation, they seemed more to be relax to perform the monologue because it was well planned speech, more over they can answer questions from other groups. In addition, there are some improvements in certain criteria of writing and speaking skills related to language knowledge i.e. vocabulary and grammar. Only that the fluency and pronunciation were in little progress, because little time they had to practice speaking. Thus, it was suggested to the teacher to give more time for students to practice speaking in English.

To sum up, this research aimed not only to investigates the advantages of cooperative learning to the end-product of students’ language skill, but also had a thoughtful to attend closely to social interactional skill that contribute to students’ development of social skills, understanding, and care for others. The researcher suggests teachers to keep students’ development abilities in mind that cooperative tasks have same elements at all levels. He or she has to set clear goals for the activity, monitor groups as they work, interfere as needed, and help students to make reflections on their experiences. Social skills are all the things we should say and do when we interact with people, social skills determine how well we get along with others, and cooperative learning opportunities are keys to developing academic and social skills.

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