Let’s Cooperate

Merve Elbirlik Tülek, Turkey

Merve Elbirlik Tülek works as an instructor and teacher trainer at Doğuş University. She holds MA in Education Management and Supervision. She is interested in learning technologies, maximizing learner involvement and learner autonomy. E-mail: mtulek@dogus.edu.tr

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Introduction
Lesson plan
Conclusion
References

Introduction

As we all know, keeping our students eager, alert and motivated is a difficult task although not impossible and asking them to work in groups, in other words encouraging them to cooperate may have various positive impacts on their learning such as promoting communicative interaction in the classroom, focusing attention to language structures and communicative functions through the use of interactive tasks, providing opportunities for learners to develop successful learning and communication strategies, enhancing learner motivation, reducing learner stress and creating a positive effective learning environment. Here is an activity that will keep our students interested, motivated and cooperating.

Lesson plan

Warm-up: Show the students a picture of cat woman (or any other super hero that you like), brainstorm superheroes with your students, write them on the board and ask the students to say something about them such as their physical appearances, habits, powers, clothes, accessories and colours. Ask if they know the comic book Fantastic Four and its characters, encourage them to talk about these characters’ appearances and abilities. Let them imagine that the Hollywood script writers are going to shoot Fantastic Four 2 but this time they are looking for 4 new characters and there will be a competition.

Creating superheroes: Ask students to work in groups of four or five (teacher-selected groups can be better), go to the website and make their own superheroes on their own computers. It is a good idea to spare some time to show the students how to use the website www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heroMachine2/heromachine2.asp. After each group completes their superhero, groups exchange one member and the rest of the group describes their superhero to the new member and the new member can ask questions about the superhero and then go back to his or her group and report back what he/she has learned. Then the students will vote about which hero they would send to the competition, but any of the groups should not vote for their own super hero.

In this way, students will have a chance for both practising speaking and writing; furthermore, doing so they will be practising some structures in language such as describing physical appearance - My superhero looks like, abilities - My superhero can / can’t, My superhero is like – personalities, habits and routines - My superhero likes / doesn’t like…

Conclusion

Cooperative activities like this reduce learner stress and boredom as the students are not obliged to speak and listen to just the teacher all the time. These activities help the introvert students to build self-confidence and provide them with the opportunities to develop successful communication skills such as speaking to multiple people, listening to others, sharing ideas, organizing ideas and creating a meaningful whole. They give the students the chance to work in groups, present ideas to a group of people, improve intrapersonal, interpersonal skills and presentation skills.

References

The British Council Learning Technologies for the EFL Classroom
www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heroMachine2/heromachine2.asp

Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.