Abstract:
The major concern of this study was to find out the overall attitude of students towards CL
and then to see if there is significant difference on grade 10 students’ attitude towards CL
due to gender. To meet these objectives, mixed research methods design was employed.
Focus group discussion, questionnaire and semi-structured interview were used to collect
data from students and semi-structured interview was used to collect data from English
teachers. 101 students and 3 English teachers were taken as a sample using simple random
sampling and purposive sampling methods respectively. Accordingly, the data were collected,
tabulated, transcribed and analyzed. Finally, it has been found that the majority of the
students have positive attitude towards cooperative learning and there is statistically
significant difference between males and females in their attitude towards CL at 0.05 level of
significance as p=0.000<0.05. Moreover, it has been distinguished that the current
implementation of CL was found to be not effective in the school. Some of the challenges
hindering the effective implementation of CL include: poor command of students’ English,
lack of participation of students, lack of students’ awareness concerning why CL is
implemented, lack of students’ motivation to work in group, excessive use of their mother
tongue, large class size, disturbance, dependency of slow and average learners on active
learners and misbehavior of students. Based on these major findings, it was recommended
that concerned bodies should raise the awareness of students on the benefits and strategies of
cooperative learning. Students should be also controlled, monitored and supervised strictly
while they are working cooperatively. Furthermore, concerned bodies should work
collaboratively to implement CL effectively and to alleviate the challenges hindering the
implementation of CL.
