Cooperative learning structures of interaction and the development of efl students oral communication skills

Abstract

In deprived socio-cultural contexts like those characterizing the locality of Usme, in the southeast of Bogotá, cooperative learning appears as an alternative to cope with students problems of interpersonal communication and conflict derived largely from gossiping, verbal aggressiveness and deliberate or non-deliberate information distortion, which result in an inappropriate learning environments such as the one I found as an EFL teacher at Fabio Lozano Simonelli public school. As a result of implementing this action research study, the students original negative mediation over their peers, which had caused conflict, turned into positive mediation. Such a change occurred thanks to the joint establishment of rules for cooperative interaction, with their corresponding peer monitoring, peer correction and peer feedback. This way, students gained awareness of the crucial factors involved in an effective oral communication as well as the importance of reporting information accurately for the construction of well-informed opinions and right decisions based on the identification and understanding of factual information. In that process, students used and showed each other a wide variety of verbal and non-verbal presentation strategies that made them put into practice the necessary sub-skills for the successful oral presentation of information. The subsequent improvement in the oral communication processes among the students led to a better classroom learning environment which facilitated EFL learning.