Abstract:

In the globalization era, education faces a lot of changes according to the development of knowledge, technology, development of methods, techniques and learning strategies. Every teacher wants to give the best for their students in order to prepare them for their future both in their professional fields and their life. In the global era the students must be ready to compete internationally.
The student centered learning with its diverse strategies takes the place conventional method. One of the strategies which was proved as one of the effective strategies is cooperative learning. Although the researches about this instructional method showed some advantages, these researches were done on elementary schools or high schools and in various fields, except foreign languages, and not on higher education.

The previous researches showed that changing the ideas actively between team members not only increase the interest of the students but also stimulate the critical thinking on the point. The result of other researches on the same topic shows that the level of students’ satisfaction in cooperative learning is higher than the students’ satisfaction who learned with the other method.
Cooperative learning assumes that students should learn in groups. Although grouping students is not the main purpose of this learning strategy, learning in groups is required for the transfer of information into construction of knowledge. The cooperative learning strategy has been used for various disciplines such as economics, history, geography, mathematics, but rarely for foreign languages, especially Russian. The Russian language is a Slavic language which has a very complex grammar. It makes a lot of difficulties for Indonesian students who learn Russian language.

In globalization era, students must master another foreign language besides English. If we take in consideration the orientation of trade in Asia and the world politic constellation, Russian language plays an important role. For achieving their target, good communication skills in Russian, the teachers must use an adequate learning strategy in order to improve students’ communication skills, critical thinking, responsibility, ability to work in team.

This research was conducted in two semesters and was provided to develop and support the participants in enhancing their learning process and experiences. The students are the class members of Syntax of Russian I and Syntax of Russian II comprising 30 students in their fifth and sixth semester of the Bachelor’s Degree Program majoring in Russian. Indonesian language is their mother tongue, although they come from various cultural backgrounds with various dialects. Their family backgrounds are also divided in terms of origin and economic status. The research conducted shows how the cooperative learning strategy is used in foreign language class (Russian) and the results after using that strategy.

This research was conducted in order to prove that cooperative learning strategy used in foreign languages classes especially in Russian language classes, has positive impacts on motivation, language skills, academic achievement, and relationships. The techniques used were Jigsaw for one semester and Numbered Heads Together for one semester. The result shows that both techniques help students to better understand the course material, develop critical thinking, communicative skill and a good attitude during the course.

Keywords:

Cooperative learning, Jigsaw, Numbered Heads Together, communication skill.