The Students’ Roles in Collaborative Learning

21 on their experiences and researches in the past or in recent years. Lodge and friends summarize the advantages of collaborative learning, the list covers: 40 a. Improved learning and achievement: higher level thinking skills, student satisfaction with the learning experience, positive attitude towards the subject, less divergence between learners’ achievement, learning orientation rather than a performance orientation, critical thinking and dialogue. b. Improved skills: oral communication skills, empathy skills, social interaction skills, self-management skills, leadership skills of female students. c. Improved engagement and responsibility: active involved exploratory learning, student responsibility for learning, student retention. d. Improved relationships: responsibility for each other, the classroom as a community, positive race relations, diversity understanding, student-staff interaction and familiarity. In addition, Muijs and Reynolds state that collaborative learning can develop students’ social skills, which means students can have more emphatic abilities; collaborative leaning can allow students to understand others’ ideas, which means students can be aware that each student has strengths and weaknesses; and collaborative learning can find an answer to a case in a group, which means students can gather all their knowledge to solve the case. 41 Furthermore, Orlich and friends summarize some of the important points about small groups, the list covers: 42 a. Increased depth of understanding and grasp of course content. b. Enhanced motivation and greater involvement with the course. c. Positive attitudes toward later use of material presented in the course. d. Problem-solving skills specific to content of the course. 40 Lodge, Watkins, and Carnell, op. cit., p. 100. 41 Muijs and Reynolds, op. cit., p. 52-53. 42 Orlich, et. al., op. cit., p. 259. 22 e. Practice in the application of concepts and information to practical problems. Meanwhile, Brown mentions the advantages of collaborative learning group work which are a bit different from other experts mostly. The advantages are generates interactive language, offers an embracing affective climate, promotes learner responsibility and autonomy, and a step toward individualizing instruction. 43 From psychology view, collaborative learning group work has two main benefits of a motivational kind which have stated by Fox. It gets closely into students’ desire to communicate each other and students talk and work together can make them interest more actively with the ideas and realities of the subject than they listen to the teacher’s instruction. 44 In additional, Kyriacou stressed that social and communication skills are grown deal with participation in small team work as important as the intelligent standard of the activity created. 45 From experts’ statements, it can be concluded that collaborative learning has great value in learning process. It influences students with many good effects toward their learning process, achievement, skills, even social life.

5. The Disadvantages of Collaborative Learning

Besides the advantages, there are also many disadvantages of collaborative learning which has taken place in the education field. Many experts have stated those disadvantages based on their experiences and researches in the past or in recent years. Muijs and Reynolds summarize the disadvantages of collaborative learning, the list covers: 46 a. It does not naturally promote independent learning and can foster dependency on certain dominant members of the group. 43 H. Douglas Brown, Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy, New York: Longman, 2001, p. 178-179. 44 Richard Fox, Teaching and Learning, Lessons from Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p. 161. 45 Kyriacou, loc. cit. 46 Muijs and Reynolds, op. cit., p. 55-57, 112. 23 b. It can easily lead to free-rider effects whereby certain members of the group do not effectively contribute and rely on the work of others. c. It can also make it harder to manage for the teacher. d. It can take a lot longer to cover a particular topic. e. Shyer pupils may feel that they are not benefiting as much. f. Pupils can strengthen each other’s misconception. g. There is a risk of classroom getting out of hand with pupils shouting out answers.

D. Teaching Descriptive Text Using Collaborative Learning

The following is the procedures in teaching descriptive text using Collaborative Learning: 1. Teacher introduces a brief explanation of Collaborative Learning that it is useful for them to develop their ability in reading descriptive text. 2. Teacher divides students into groups. There are 32 students in the class 7B. Each group consists of 4 students. So, there are 8 groups in the class. 3. Teacher gives a descriptive text for each group. 4. Teacher gives instructions for all groups to read and to understand the descriptive text. 5. Teacher handles all groups when they are doing the task and helps them when they are getting difficulty. 6. Teacher allows students to look for the meaning of difficult words in the dictionary if they find those words in the text. 7. Teacher asks students to answer the questions related to the text. 8. Teacher and students check the answers which have been answered by students. 9. Teacher gives score based on the students’ works have been checked.

E. Previous Studies

Related to this study, there are some previous studies which have sameness in each variable and method of research. The previous studies as below: