4. Student’s Role in a Collaborative Learning
Learners become members of a community – their fellow learners and the teacher – and learn through interacting with members of the
community. Learning is not views as an individual accomplishment but as something that is achieved collaboratively
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. Students also have new roles in the collaborative classroom. Their
major rules are collaborator and active participator. It is useful to think how these new roles influence the processes and activities that students conduct
before, during, and after learning. For example, before learning, students set goals and plan learning tasks; during learning, they work together to
accomplish tasks and monitor their progress; and after learning, they asses their performance and plan for future. As mediator, the teacher helps students
to fulfill their new roles. In the content course on learning styles and strategies, we first
decided upon our goals for the class and then selected a textbook. We used the progression of the chapters in the book as a point of departure on which to
base our syllabus
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. Students prepare for the goal setting, the teacher invites them to
discuss and decide the learning goal.
5. The Advantages of collaborative Learning
In the course we use group work a great deal by structuring groups of three or four students, with each group consisting of learners
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. Each student has proportionally more chance to speak and to be involved in language use
because they are asked to have discussion during doing the task.
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Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 120
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David Nunan, Collaborative Language Learning and Teaching, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 167
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David Nunan, Collaborative Language Learning and Teaching…, p. 169
Students apply higher thinking strategies which help them construct meaning from what they read and help them monitor progress toward their
goals. One of the important aspects of collaborative learning is that it is
helping promote collaborative behavior and better group relations among students. It is simultaneously helping students with their academic learning.
6. The Disadvantages of Collaborative learning
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