A Study Of The Influence Of Group Cohesiveness On The Effectiveness Of Cooperative Learning In Groups In The EFL Setting

Cooperation is a basic form of interaction between people."Learning to cooperate"is regarded as one of the four backbones in education in the 21st century when Learning—The Treasure Within was submitted to the UNESCO by theInternational Educational Committee. To raise students'awareness of cooperation and enhance their ability of cooperation, therefore, has become a goal in school education. One of the effective ways to achieve that is language teaching and learning, since the fundamental purpose of language teaching and learning is to master a communication tool which is indispensable to cooperation. It is thus obvious that language teaching and learning, compared with other subjects, needs cooperative learning most.Cooperative learning has long been researched in terms of its effects, results of which indicate the coexistence of its positive and negative effects. Therefore it is necessary to find out what can ensure the effectiveness of cooperative learning. Although it is widely agreed that the effectiveness of cooperative learning can be ensured by the five elements proposed by Johnson and Johnson (1994) (Slavin, 1995; Johnson brothers, 1999; Fall & Webb, 2000; Ghazi Ghaith, 2003; Long & Porter, 1985; Slain, 1990; Oxford, 1993; George, 1986; William, 1991), yet with the development of social psychology, it has been found in recent years that the effectiveness of cooperation in groups is also closely connected with group cohesiveness (Prapavessis & Carron, 1997; Boone, Beitel & Kuhlman, 1997).Group cohesiveness has been alleged connected with group work performance by a variety of researches, most of which are theoretically based on the conceptual model proposed by Carron (1985). Yet this model has only begun to be tested outside the sports setting (Chang et al., 2006), without abundant experimental results obtained in the EFL setting. Moreover, these researches center on the relationship between group cohesiveness and its effects rather than the relationship between group factors, such as goal-setting, interaction and leadership, and group cohesiveness.Therefore, this study intends to verify that in the EFL setting group cohesiveness can be enhanced by goal-setting, interaction and leadership, and the enhanced group cohesiveness can ensure the effectiveness of cooperative learning. An experiment thereafter was carried out, from which results of questionnaires and interviews on 29 participants taking part in group work in Advanced English class were collected. Analysis and discussions of the collected data from the experiment find that goal-setting, interaction and leadership indeed can improve group cohesiveness, and enhanced group cohesiveness does ensure the effectiveness of cooperative learning.