Student Participation VIIB English Extracurricular Class Students in

13 likely to be sources of frustration, failure, humiliation, and punishment as well as presenting opportunities for social growth, pleasure, learning skills and knowledge, and gaining experience in the art of becoming adult ” p. 23. Socially, adolescents, 11 to 18 years old students, are more vulnerable than any other age group. Since they are entering a new world, the adolescents are still unsure about their position and they need to adapt. The adolescents call for much support from the family and school, as well as the support from their friends. In this moment, the teacher has the full responsibility to guide and support them because their friends are still adolescents who need guidance too. According to Clark and Starr 1991, “sympathetic guidance at this point is most critical because it is at this time that one begins to form one‟s value, life view and mode of living ” p. 24. They need support from their friends because self-recognition between their friends is also important. For the adolescent students, social relationship is more likely to be the part of recognizing themselves. Many learning activities are better done in pair or even in group. It is because through the pair and group work, adolescent students can learn both directly and indirectly with the help of their friends as the model. As stated by Hamachek 1985, “the participants‟ primary motivation is not necessarily to know others, but to know themselves through feedback from others ”. As the growth of the adolescent students, a peer group involvement takes big contribution in the development of the social and cognitive skill of young adult students. According to Hamachek 1985, “at least six important functions 14 have been identified that are most directly associated with peer group involvement ”. They are as follows: a. To some extent, peer group takes the place of the family. b. Peer group membership is a useful stabilizer during a period of rapid transition. c. The peer group can be an important source of self-esteem in the sense of being important to someone outside the family. d. The peer group insulates and protects adolescents to some extent. e. The peer group provides the opportunity to practice by doing. f. The peer group offers a psychosocial model that many parents simply cannot provide. The involvement of peer group relations can be the inspiration of teachers to make the learning process becomes more memorable and enjoyable for the students through group learning. It may also suitable for the nature of the adolescent students, in which the learning environment must be a place where the students want to be and creatively developed through the process of learning. Dealing with the situation, the researcher suggested cooperative learning as a teaching approach that maybe applicable for the adolescents learners to improve their participation. Glasser 1990, states that “cooperative learning is a way to make the classroom a place learners want to be. Classrooms emphasizing cooperative learning motivate all learners to engage in learning activity ” as cited by Borich, 1996:511. It may also give good result to the learning process because in cooperative learning, the idea is that the students want to succeed as a team, so they should encourage their teammates to excel and help them to do so.