Public School Students’ Performance in an EFL Cooperative Work Environment

Abstract

For two years we worked with public school teachers in the PROFILE program at Universidad Nacional de Colombia to support them in developing their theoretical and practical knowledge to implement cooperative learning methodologies. Their opinions, which were gathered by means of interviews, reports and surveys as they participated in this teacher development program, have been the sources for this study. The data collected informed us how these EFL educators perceived their students’ performances and attitudes towards cooperative experiences in public schools. Our findings report how students grew at a personal and group level and how they undertook their learning of English by means of this methodology.

Keywords

• Cooperative learning
• teacher development programs
• methods for the teaching of English
• public school students’ English learning