LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:12 December 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIAL

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2012
M. S. Thirumalai
Custom Search

Collaborative Learning:
An Antidote for Unheard Voices in Language Classrooms

Dr. S. Usha Menon and Dr. C. Alamelu

Confronting Mixed Ability Classes

Classrooms anywhere in the world are made up of groups of students who differ from one another in their intellectual, physical and emotional constitution. These result in disparity in learning styles and learning speeds, leading to heterogeneous classrooms comprising mixed ability students with variations in motivation and comprehension levels. This is reflected in the poor performance by slow learners leading to a general feeling among them that their voices, though feeble, are most often unheard. This universal phenomenon poses a variety of challenges on an everyday basis to teachers about how different learner- needs can be met and also how the slow learners can be motivated to become participative, interactive and active learners. This issue of confronting mixed ability classes is approached from various angles by educators by using a variety of educational methods and approaches to actualize improvement in students’ achievements. One such productive method is Collaborative Learning (CL).

What is CL?

Collaborative learning is a process of learning where the exploration and construction of knowledge ensues through meaningful interaction among learners. This is accomplished by forming a team of students, working in pairs or groups, to realize the objective of solving and completing a task or a problem. Similar thoughts are reflected in the explanation by Roschelle & Behrend (1995), “Collaboration is the process of building and maintaining a shared conception of a problem.”

The adoption of CL has potentially transformed the traditional classrooms into a vibrant center of participative learning, with wider scope for positive influence, through interaction amongst students. Collaborative classrooms are characterized by a learner focused environment and the critical and encouraging feature here is that the teacher acts as a facilitator to guide the intellectual experiences of the students. The students with different levels of ability learn from each other. The differences between traditional and collaborative classrooms are vividly encapsulated by practitioners by examining the differences between them and taking into account the enormous advantages of CL for accomplishing meaningful learning.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. S. Usha Menon
Professor & Head

Dr. C. Alamelu
Assistant Professor (SLG)

Department of English
Easwari Engineering College
Chennai - 600089
Tamilnadu
India
ushalla@rediffmail.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.