Abstract:

These days, the highly competitive world poses high expectations in the working market and the need of people with soft skills such as problem solving, leadership, decision making, communicational skills and teamwork strategies among others. Most of these skills flourish within a classroom environment; however, many times teachers face difficulties implementing well-planned tasks for group work activities that will lead learners to develop communicational skills. This study relies on the use of the Cooperative Language Learning Approach (CLL) to provide Second Language Learners (L2) with the tools to perform communicational tasks in a setting of interaction, interdependence, cooperation, and learning autonomy to pursue the management of soft skills and enhance their productive and receptive communicational skills.

This qualitative study took place at one of the top-ranked public universities in Ecuador. Data collection derived from face-to-face interviews, journal and data analysis from a group of twenty-eight students with an intermediate level or B1 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). All of them were full-time students at the university from different majors in sciences and humanities. The sessions lasted four weeks, two-hour class each session, three sessions each week. The study focused on three questions: How can Cooperative Language Learning Approach (CLL) help learners improve their communicational skills? How can group work activities affect learners’ participation in order to develop their communicational skills? How effective is the implementation of roles in group work activities? Findings revealed a remarkable level of accomplishment. This suggests that cognitive and social outcomes improved significantly throughout the process. In addition, the implementation of the cooperative learning groups resulted into more self-confident learners when participating in receptive and active communicational tasks. Consequently, their personal apprehensions decreased towards the fact of working in small groups in order to pursuit a common goal as suggested by Brown & Ciuffetelli Parker (2009) and Siltala (2010) 5 important elements learners are to be accomplished during CLL intervention: positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual and group accountability, social skills and group processing.

Though cooperative learning strategies may be hard for teachers for which it means to adapt teaching resources, planning and groups formation, the results are impressively positive as suggested by Cohen (2004) where the outcomes showed a high level of enhancement of students’ communicative skills and language achievement.

Keywords:

Cooperative Language Learning, soft skills, communicative skills, group work, EFL learners, L2 learners.