EXAMINING GENDER DYNAMICS AND IMPLEMENTATION OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING IN EFL CLASSROOM: THE CASE OF SIRE SECONDARY SCHOOL, ARSI, OROMIA REGIONAL STATE

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.