Developing cooperative learning in efl contents. Introduction

Cooperative Base Groups
Cooperative Base Groups are "long-term, heterogeneous CL groups with stable membership"³⁶ (Johnson and Johnson, 1999; cited in Gillies ). The groups are created to last from one semester to a whole year in which students are required to help each other achieve academic goals.
In this type of CL, teachers present and teach the needed social skills. They form heterogeneous groups of three or four, plan regular meetings, assign the groups tasks and requirements to be accomplished in each meeting and ensure the implementation of CL elements. On the other hand, students have to ensure that all members complete the task, provide assistance to build interpersonal bounds and check understanding.
Researchers (Cross, 2003; Ellis, 2003; Willis, 1999) admit that the teacher, in any CL type, should explain to the students the objectives of the group task and the way they will be graded. S/he should act as a facilitator and guide to give feedback and assistance when necessary. Although students are responsible for carrying out tasks and managing their learning, the teacher still controls the class and has the power to give an end to the cooperative activity if necessary. Another important task for the teacher to perform is designing groups. Ellis (2003) points out that groups of four are highly recommended because they can be split up into pairs, and that heterogeneous teams result in better academic achievement. In order to create heterogeneous groups, some teachers prefer to choose students randomly, mixing males with females, verbal with quiet students, high-achieving with low-achieving learners. Others give students freedom to select their partner (but this may end up with homogeneous groups (Cohen, 1994)). Others prefer to take into consideration students' prior achievement (for example, from a pre-test), ethnicity and gender. Teachers also should structure tasks so that each participant in a group has the opportunity to contribute with something to complete it successfully.