The direct teaching of social skills
Many disabled students don't pick up on social cues that come intuitively to general education students. A T- Chart is often helpful in providing on-going practice. Teachers can model important social skills and provide students with graphic and audio cues for promoting proper social behavior.

Extended time
Differentiating tasks depending on ability levels allows students to work at their own pace without added peer pressure. Using Think/Pair/Share builds in the " Wait Time" so important to special learners. It also provides regular students the opportunity to formulate more critical and higher level answers.

Activities
A combination of cooperative learning "multiple intelligences" games and activities is highly motivating and permits students with different learning styles and abilities to compete. Cooperative learning helps to operationalize Howard Gardner's theory and helps students with sequencing and inter-personal relationships.

Alternative assessment
An additional means of evaluating students with disabilities who usually perform poorly on norm-referenced standardized exams is the 6-step Group Investigation process. It affords students the opportunity to learn an aspect of the curriculum in detail and report on their investigation in a successful manner, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

Processing
This is a fundamental element of cooperative learning that helps to promote metacognition. The special education population lacks strategies for solving problems and requires experience in self and group evaluation. Debriefing is necessary to demonstrate to students the importance of "process" over "product".

Fred Brandt, Ph.D., is a veteran teacher of learning-disabled students at the high school level and teaches prospective teachers of LDS at Fordham University.FJBrandt@aol.com

CL in Japan: A Program for EFL Classes in Japanese Universities
by Christopher Jon Poel

Cooperative learning is becoming more and more common in Japan, especially in the field of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). The Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) annual conference has had numerous presentations on CL in the past decade or so, including workshops, papers, and demonstrations, and one issue of JALT's monthly magazine, The Language Teacher, was dedicated to introducing language teachers to CL (Poel, et al., 1994). In addition, last year saw the publication of a special volume on CL in Japan (Kluge, et al., 1999). This volume reveals that CL is now being used at all levels of teaching - private language schools, junior high schools, senior high schools, junior colleges, universities, and