Shortly after the end of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1989), I joined the Department of Education of the American University of Beirut (AUB) as assistant professor. We started a series of in-service teacher training workshops which have continued to the present and aim at helping English language teachers keep up-to-date with recent developments in the field of ESL (English as a Second Language)/EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and at introducing cooperative learning (CL) and other practical and innovative techniques into their classes.

In the early 1990s, a feeling of tension, skepticism, and self-consciousness prevailed amongst the participants in the workshops, mainly due to the civil war that had a tremendous negative impact on schooling in the country due to absenteeism, destruction of school facilities, distrust, and sharp declines in standards. Worse still, some participants felt inadequate as teachers and feared that the workshops might expose their inadequacies to others.

Solving the above problems called for the design of workshops that would create a tension-reducing atmosphere, help boost the trainees’ egos, and show them that learning can be enjoyable. The workshops received a boost when, in 1992, the AUB organized its first major post-civil war conference in Larnaca, Cyprus. Larnaca was chosen as the conference venue because of the travel ban on Americans to Lebanon at that time due to the hijacking of a TWA aircraft from Beirut International Airport back in 1985. The theme of the conference was conflict resolution, and it attracted participants from all over the Middle East, Europe, and the USA. In the conference, I presented a paper on peace education in the EFL/ESL classroom in collaboration with Professor Kassim Shaaban who had organized and participated in several workshops that had included some applications of CL for the language classroom.

The AUB conflict resolution conference included several sessions on CL, and created awareness about the effectiveness and viability of CL as a mechanism for maximizing students interaction in the language classroom. The participants saw the potential of CL for increasing motivation, enhancing social skills, providing opportunities for language practice, combining language and content learning, and boosting achievement in a stress-reduced and supportive environment. As such, CL offered an attractive set of techniques that correlated with language acquisition theory in the domains of comprehensible input and output, low affective filter, and bridging social language and academic language.

Fortunately, participants at the conference had a chance to experience firsthand some CL applications immediately following the AUB conflict resolution conference. In connection with the conference, Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University (USA) gave a four-day workshop to the faculty members of the AUB Department of Education who were present at the conflict resolution conference. Slavin made a strong case for using CL in various subject areas, including language, based on empirical research evidence that strongly suggested the superiority of CL to traditional instruction in increasing the cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of schooling. Slavin demonstrated procedures for assigning students to heterogeneous groups based on gender, ethnicity, and achievement and concluded the workshop with practical applications of the dynamics of the STAD and Jigsaw methods (Slavin, 1995).

Returning to Beirut, my colleagues and I decided to share what we had learned in Larnaca with the Lebanese teachers of English back home. Thus, we started a regular series of workshops. Later on in 1996, when I served on the High Committee for Curriculum Development of the Lebanese National Center for Educational Research and Development, I introduced CL as an instructional framework at the national level as he served.

Consequently, training in CL applications spread nationwide and many schools now use CL to varying degrees in their instruction. Currently, the Structural Approach (Kagan, 1994), the Learning Together Approach (Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 2002), Student Team Learning (Slavin, 1995) and Group Investigation (Sharan & Sharan, 1992) are familiar to many English teachers in the country.

Ghazi Ghaith, American University of Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon, gghaith@aub.edu.lb

References

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Holubec, E. J. (2002). Circles of learning. 5th ed. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.

Kagan, S. (1994). Cooperative Learning. San Clemente, CA: Kagan Cooperative Learning.

Sharan, Y., & Sharan, S. (1992). Expanding cooperative learning through group investigation. Colchester, VT: Teachers College Press.

Slavin, R. E. (1995). Cooperative learning: Theory, research, and practice (2^nd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.