The document discusses collaborative learning activities informed by theories from Maslow, Freire, Vygotsky, and Wilkinson, emphasizing the benefits of group work for language acquisition and student engagement. It highlights various learning strategies, including cognitive and metacognitive approaches, to enhance learners' skills and self-esteem while encouraging innovative teaching methods. Collaborative learning is presented as a pathway to improve social skills, reduce anxiety, and make the curriculum more accessible for gifted students.

2. COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
ACTIVITIES

3. Developed from the theories of Abraham
Maslow and Paolo Freire and
inspired by the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and
Andrew Wilkinson.
Abraham Maslow Paolo Freire Lev Vygotsky

4. Collaborative learning activity
involves learners working together
in order to complete a task.
Collaboration increases the
opportunities a student has to use
the target language, and thereby
develop their skills in it.

5. COLLABORATIVE LEARNING PROJECT
Do you want to s t r e t c h
the minds of your
gifted and talented
students?

6. Do you want to extend
the
range of teaching and
learning styles in your
classrooms?

7. Do you want to
make
the curriculum
more
accessible?
Do you want
to
improve social
skills?

8. Employ teaching and learning strategies
and collaborative activities in your
classroom and be an innovative teacher.

9. • Collaborative learning can create a student-centered
situation in which the learners will feel
more relaxed and ready to learn (Yang, 2009).
Learners usually feel shy to speak in front of the
whole class and therefore arrange the class in
small groups in order to reduce their anxiety.
Moreover, their intrinsic motivation,
interpersonal skills and self-esteem will be
improved through being engaged in group
activities. Collaborative learning plays an
essential role in second language acquisition
(ibid). Design group works in order learners
become involved in some collaborative activities
and learn to use the different learning strategies.

10. Learning Strategies:
Direct Strategies:
Memory
Cognitive
Compensation
Indirect Strategies:
Metacognitive
Affective
Social

11. Cognitive Strategy is a mental process
and when learning, it helps the selection of
relevant information and rejection of
irrelevant one. It relates to recognizing,
comprehending, organizing materials,
summarizing, repeating, translating, using
formulas and patterns, problem solving and
interacting in the target language (Cohen,
cited in Schmitt 2010).

12. Memory strategy helps the learners to
store and retrieve information. Moreover, it is
involved in semantic mapping, grouping,
representing sounds and images. (Oxford,
1992).

13. compensation strategy is
employed when learners need to
continue the communication despite of
the gap in their linguistic knowledge. It
helps them to make up the missing
knowledge by adjusting the message,
combining words or switching to the
mother tongue (ibid).

14. Metacognitive strategy involves in
thinking about the mental process that is
engaged in the learning process. In addition,
it controls and regulates the learning plans,
and decides how to learn effectively,
monitors and then evaluates it (Richards &
Schmidt, 2010).

15. Being able to use affective
strategy, learners can control the level
of anxiety, increase the motivation and
positive thinking and improve their self-esteem.
Affective strategy is involved in
emotional, motivational, attitudinal, and
personal characteristic aspects of the
learners (Wasilewska, 2012 & Oxford, 1992) .

16. Social strategy that is quite crucial
because languages are social phenomena and
are learned to communicate with others. It is
involved in interacting with the speakers of
the target language in order to improve the
language, cooperating with peers and
developing cultural understanding. In
addition, those who do pair-work and group-work
in class make use of social strategy
(ibid).

17. Identifying language learning strategies seem to
be a solution for Second Language Acquisition
problems. Furthermore, language classrooms
ought to focus on both teaching and developing
learning. Learners need to identify their own
language learning strategies according to their
objectives. Moreover, teachers need to explore
what strategies the learners use for each
objective. Teachers can try to train as autonomous
learners as much as possible. Autonomous learners
are able to evaluate the practicality of a strategy critically.
They can also choose the appropriate strategy for a task
and successfully transfer it to a new task (Chamot, 2004).

18. Some Important Collaborative
Activities
Jigsaw reading
Improves students’ motivation, affective, social and cognitive
strategies
Poster Presentation
Improves students’ affective, social and cognitive strategies
Special method of writing
Stimulate students’ imagination and creativity
Ezat Amirbakzadeh Kalati
MA TESOL
University of Bath, UK