The Effectiveness of Using the Cooperative Language Learning Approach to Enhance EFL Writing Skills

What is it about?

Cooperative language learning (CLL) approach was used to encourage second-year university students at the college of languages and translation, at Al-Imam University to learn from their peers so that they could develop their writing skills. Students in CLL-based groups were trained to be more responsible for their learning through developing their personal interaction as well as their linguistic competence in a more relaxed social context. This treatment included sophomore students enrolled in EN 211 course in the second semester of 2013 academic year. Two instruments were used in this study; a pre-post writing test, and an attitude questionnaire. The pre- and post- scores from the test were calculated for descriptive statistics and compared using a Wilcoxon Test. The process of evaluating students’ writings focused mainly on analyzing their mistakes with regard to spelling, using of vocabulary, grammar, punctuation as well as coherence. The findings revealed that the students’ scores in writing were higher for the post-test than the pre-test at the significance level of .001 after being subject to this kind of treatment. However, it must be stated that the degree of improvement was not extremely high as students still made some mistakes with regard to the previously mentioned points. As for the attitude scale, the results obtained proved that the students developed positive attitudes towards using the cooperative learning approach to develop language skills in general and to develop their writing skills in particular.

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Photo by Boxed Water Is Better on Unsplash

Photo by Boxed Water Is Better on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The need to conduct such a study arose from the researcher’s work as an assistant professor at Al-Imam University, college of Languages and Translation. The researcher has been teaching writing courses to university students since 2010 and has found that essay writing needs a lot to be done effectively especially among Saudi University students who could not write well even after eleven years of learning English. The students’ inability to write effectively may be due to three main factors, namely, their cognitive background which reflected their inability to develop interesting and thoughtful ideas, their linguistic deficiency which was represented in their errors with regard to spelling, capitalization, vocabulary and structure, and academic writing problems in designing and planning paragraphs cohesively. Such basic deficiencies were often detected during the researcher’s teaching of writing courses. It has therefore been suggested that the CLL approach could be an effective method to overcome these problems. From the researcher’s point of view, the cooperative learning approach could serve as an effective method to fulfill the needs of university learners as it could develop cooperation among students within each group and promote respect for their varied experiences and backgrounds. It could also provide students with adequate opportunities to think and talk together, and consequently they could share ideas about the writing requirements. Such a less-anxiety producing environment let students write with no fear of being subject to critical situation and it might create an interesting atmosphere in which the writing process would become less burdensome and less boring. This study focused on the impact of using the CLL approach on developing EFL writing skills inside an EFL classroom. More specifically, the study attempted to answer the following questions: 1. To what extent was the CLL approach effective in developing second-year university students’ writing skills? 2. What is the general attitude of the second-year university students towards the use of the CLL approach to enhance their EFL writing skills?

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