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Volume 3, Number 1, May 2018 

 ISSN : 2579-8383 (Print) ISSN : 2579-8405 (Online)  

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How The Students Perceive On The Use Of Cooperative Learning 

In Teaching Speaking 

 
Netty Huzniati Andas 

Universitas Sembilanbelas November Kolaka 

ilamsmommy8631@gmail.com 

 

Accepted: 

March 10, 2018 

Reviewed: 

April 10, 2018 

Published: 

May 20, 2018 

 

Abstract: Cooperative Learning is teaching method in which students work in a small group to 
achieve a joint goal. This study aimed to investigate students’ perception toward Cooperative 
Learning in improving their ability to speak. This research employed qualitative research design. 
There were six (6) intermediate students in Progress English Course Center as participants in this 
research. Those participants were selected through purposive sampling technique. To gain the 
data, interview and students’ field diary were used. The result of both questionnaire and students’ 
field diary were positive, which means students showed a good response when teacher taught 
them by using Cooperative Learning. Students no longer felt anxious in speaking, they were not 
afraid anymore to express their idea, and they become an active participant in group discussion. 
This study concluded that students supported the use of Cooperative Learning on teaching 
speaking. 

 

Keywords : Cooperative Learning, Speaking Ability 

 

 

INTRODUCTION  

Speaking skill is important to teach due to the large number of students who want to 

study English in order to be able to use English for communicative purposes. Richards and 

Renandya's 1state that the large number of language learners in the world have a greatest 

increasing in learning English in order to develop proficiency in speaking. Moreover, the 

students of second foreign language education programs are considered successful if they can 

communicate effectively in the target language. 

In the teaching of English, however, speaking skill is considered to be difficult one, and 

in order to be able to communicate effectively the learners are required to know its grammatical 

and semantic rules.  Learners must also acquire the knowledge of how native speakers use the 

language in the context of structured-interpersonal exchange, in which many factors interact2. 

Therefore, it is difficult for EFL learners to speak the target language fluently and appropriately. 

As the ability to speak English is very complex task considering the nature of what is 

                                                       
1 Jack C Richards and Willy A Renandya, Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice 

(Cambridge university press, 2002). 
2 S. Rahayu et al., “The Professional Competency Teachers Mediate the Influence of Teacher Innovation and 

Emotional Intelligence on School Security,” Journal of Social Studies Education Research 9, no. 2 (2018). 

mailto:ilamsmommy8631@gmail.com


  
 

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involved in speaking, not all of the students in an EFL speaking class have the courage to speak.  

Sato (2003) found that the students of English were not highly competent in speaking because of 

their fear of making mistakes. The same finding was also shared by another research which 

conducted by Hua3, She found that the students fail to join the English discussion because of 

their vocabulary problems and fear of making mistakes resulting in their inability to speak 

English well. In addition, she stated that the students felt English were stressful activity especially 

if they had to perform some class activities using English.  

Many researchers had conducted a research to find out how students perceive when they 

taught by using Cooperative Learning especially in teaching speaking. Juhana 4 found that 

students were enjoying the teaching and learning process when the teacher used CL in teaching 

speaking. The students’ psychological factors such as shyness, anxiety, lack of confidence and 

lack of motivation as the biggest obstacle for the students in speaking activity was coped with 

CL.  This finding suggested that the teacher should be more aware on the use of CL to help 

students’ to overcome their hindrance to speak in English class. The teacher strategy also must 

be taken into account to build up the students’ ability in speaking, for instance the way of the 

teacher  in stimulating and encouraging the students in learning English, moreover in learning 

activity the teacher was demanded to provide a good environment for the students in order they  

attained the target language, and the teacher should have enough knowledge or skill to be applied 

in the classroom, whereas speaking skill that includes vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar 

were quite different from the students’ mother tongue.  

Those findings above were open our eyes that speaking is not an easy task. It is not 

simply prompting the students’ involvement to interact with others, nevertheless recognizing 

how the students’ perceive when they wanted to speak were more valuable and inevitable. 

Therefore, this research carried out an issue to inquire dealing with the students’ perception on 

the implementation of Cooperative Learning in teaching speaking. This research did not 

investigate the students’ perception on speaking activity likes Juhana, Koichi Sato, and Jin Yan 

Hua did5. Nonetheless, this study concerned to find out how the students’ perceive when they 

were taught speaking by using Cooperative Learning.   In hope, this research led the teacher to 

provide an effective strategy to create competent speakers of English. 

 The reason why researcher applied CL instruction in speaking activity because it had 

been proclaimed as an effective instructional method in promoting linguistic development of 

learners of English as a social language6. In line with Kagan7,  revealed that cooperative learning 

                                                       
3 Dana M Basnight-Brown et al., “Monolingual and Bilingual Recognition of Regular and Irregular English 

Verbs: Sensitivity to Form Similarity Varies with First Language Experience,” Journal of memory and language 57, no. 1 
(2007): 65–80. 

4 Juhana Juhana, “Psychological Factors That Hinder Students from Speaking in English Class (A Case Study 
in a Senior High School in South Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia),” Journal of Education and Practice 3, no. 12 (2012): 
100–110. 

5 Koichi Sato, “Improving Our Students’ Speaking Skills: Using Selective Error Correction and Group Work 
To Reduce Anxiety and Encourage Real Communication.” (2003). 

6 Spencer Kagan and Spencer Kagan, Cooperative Learning, vol. 2 (Kagan Cooperative Learning San Juan 
Capistrano, CA, 1994). 

7 Robert E Slavin, “Research on Cooperative Learning and Achievement: What We Know, What We Need 
to Know,” Contemporary educational psychology 21, no. 1 (1996): 43–69. 



  
 

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provides students with the ability to socialize with others, in which they work together in small 

group to accomplish the joint goal, help each other to complete the task, the students perceive 

that they can achieve their learning goals if all the members of their group also attain their goals, 

and so much more. It may be contrasted with competitive learning in which the students work 

against each other to achieve an academic goal and individualistic learning where the students 

work by themselves to accomplish an academic goal and they do not cooperate with each other 

to get the goals.  

As the great benefit of Cooperative Learning in language skill, the researcher attempted 

to find out students’ perception on CL, how the students perceive when their teacher applied CL 

in teaching speaking. An understanding of students’ perception will lead to the possibility of 

more effective teaching learning strategy. As revealed by Oxford8 to find an effective strategy in 

teaching speaking, students need to write down a note about what strategy of learning used and 

to describe their language strategies freely. When allowing students to clarifying their feeling on 

the course content for instance in speaking, the students can openly tell what they want, they 

obstacle they find in learning, and a lot of things. The teacher, therefore can give them feedback 

or help students to reduce the difficulties found. Interested in applying learning strategies, then it 

will lead to the employment of learning strategies in their whole activities. If the previous studies 

tend to focus on how the strategy can promote students’ speaking performance and also how 

this strategy correlate to the students’ speaking performance. Since it is also important to 

examine students’ perception, therefore this study is conducted to investigate how the students 

perceive the use of Cooperative Learning strategy. 

 

RESEARCH METHOD 

This research used qualitative research design which aimed to find out students’ 

perception on the implementation of Cooperative Learning in teaching speaking. As Hancock 9 

explains that in qualitative studies, the key concern is to understand the phenomenon of interest 

from the participants’ perspective, not the researchers’. 

The participant in this study were six students whose age was around 16 years old. These 

respondents were taught speaking by using Cooperative Learning strategy for several meeting 

that had been organized by the researcher.  In selecting the subject, the researcher applied 

purposive sampling technique. According to Sugiyono 10 purposive sampling is the most 

common technique in qualitative research. 

The researcher used two kinds of instrument, they were questionnaire and interview. The 

questionnaire was used to gain the students‘ perception toward Cooperative Learning on their 

speaking performance. Moreover, interview was used to clarify the information got in 

questionnaire. 

In data collection, the researcher administered questionnare two times. First was at the 

                                                       
8 Jonathan Law and Elizabeth A Martin, “Oxford Dictionary of Law,” J. Law, EA Martin.–[Seventh Edition].–

Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009). 
9 Beverley Hancock, Elizabeth Ockleford, and Kate Windridge, An Introduction to Qualitative Research (Trent 

focus group, 2001). 
10 Prof Sugiyono, “Metode Penelitian Kombinasi (Mixed Methods),” Bandung: Alfabeta (2015). 



  
 

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first meeting before the students were taught using Cooperative Learning, and the second was in 

at the 7th meetings as the last meeting of the training. After collecting the result of students‘ 

questionnaire, interview was conducted. It was supposed to gather more in depth data about 

students‘ feeling and also to investigate more students‘ point of view that might be less or not 

covered in questionnaire. To make the participants were easier to share their idea about how the 

felt when the teacher taught them used Cooperative Learning, furthermore, they were permitted 

to use English or mix their language in English with Bahasa. 

To analyze the data the researcher used three steps they were; Reading, Describing, and 

Classifying. First was reading, here the researcher read and write about all field note, transcript 

respondents comments to get an initial sense of the data. The second was describing, it involves 

developing comprehension secription of participants, setting, and the phenomenon being 

studied. The description were based on the collected observation, interview result, and field 

diary. The purpose of this step was to provide a narrative pcture of the stting of an event that 

take palce in it. The last was claasifying, the purpose of this step was to categorize the data, to 

organize and to group the data into the theme. 

 

RESULT AND DISCUSSION 

The results of questionnaire have shown that the students seemed to support the CL in 

teaching particularly in speaking. It can be seen in the students’ response below: 

Item Number 3 : Implementasi cooperative learning memudahkan saya untuk belajar berbicara Bahasa 

Inggris. 

 

 
Figure 19: The diagram of frequency of each scale for item number 3 

 

The data and the diagram showed that, the students mostly strongly agree with the 

statement that the implementation of cooperative learning make them easy in learning speaking. 

There were 4 (66,67%) students confirmed strongly agree and there were 2 (33,33%) students 

confirmed agree with the statement. 

With respect to their feelings about CL, most of the students found this instruction good 

and useful for them. Regarding the usefulness of CL, all of the students agreed that teaching 

speaking through CL was useful for them in various ways. Most students thought that they were 



  
 

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being able to speak English well after the implementation of CL in teaching speaking, in which 

most of the students’ problem in speaking had been solved when they taught through 

cooperative learning.  

In cooperative learning, the students not only affect in their ability to speak, but also the 

students obtain many ideas and information from other students. It found in the data below: 

Question 4 : Jika anda menyukai cara guru mengimplementasikan metode cooperative learning, pada bagian 

manakah yang anda sukai/senangi? 

FL : Yang paling saya sukai kita dapat lebih akrab dengan teman dan memotivasi untuk belajar 

speaking dan saat membacakan topic dan teman-teman tertarik dengan topik saya. 

JM : Ketika kita berdiskusi dengan teman tentang sesuatu hal sehingga sangat memotivasi kita 

untuk mengeluarkan pendapat dan berbicara dalam bahasa Inggris. 

From two descriptions above, the students admitted that sharing opinion and idea from 

one another is the activity they like most in cooperative learning. It was because there was a 

process of exchanging information from each student in a group, therefore, they learn the assign 

material better before sharing it with other. This such a thing make the students become 

responsible to their own duty for the requirement to accomplish the joint task. As stated by 

Johnson & Johnson (1996, p 48) that in cooperative learning each individual team member is 

responsible for learning the material and also for helping the other members in the group.  

After the students attended the teaching English through cooperative learning, all of 

them agreed that CL affected their ability to speak. It can be found in the data below: 

Question 6 : Apakah anda tertarik untuk belajar Speaking setelah guru mengajarkan Bahasa Inggris dengan 

menggunakan metode cooperative learning?  

NI : Ya, bahkan sangat tertarik karena dengan cooperative learning banyak manfaat yang 

didapatkan seperti kepercayaan diri dan menambah kosakata dalam bahasa Inggris.  

AF : Ya karena dengan guru mengajar dengan menggunakan metode itu, saya tidak merasa takut 

ataupun malu saat ditanya ataupun saat menjelaskan materi saya. 

JM : Ya, karena dengan belajar bahasa inggris dengan menggunakan CL memotivasi kita untuk 

lebih aktif berbicara dan berpikir bersama jika ada hal yang kurang diketahui. 

  In the data above, the students admitted that they had a chance to learn and memorize a 

lot of new vocabularies when discussed or shared idea with their friend, the students became 



  
 

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more active in speaking because they were not afraid to make some mistakes when expressing 

the  idea or opinion within the group, in addition, there were an increasingly friendship intimate 

among the students which made them feel relax and enjoy the class. This happened because the 

students had got social skill which was allowed them to mingle with other member in the group 

11 In the current study, students’ positive feelings might derive from their learning experience 

through CL for several meetings. 

To conclude, there were some points from the questionnaires were worth noting. The 

first was, the findings from the present study suggested that Teaching speaking using CL 

improve students’ ability in memorizing new vocabularies and it guided students to produce idea 

or opinion easily.  Some activities in CL, such as interview each other and discussion made the 

students put their positive feelings towards the implementation of CL teaching Speaking. In 

conclusion, the finding indicated that teaching speaking through Cooperative Learning was 

responded positively by the students and the implementation was highly recommended. 

 

CONCLUSION 

This study concluded that there was a positive perception of students’ when they were 

taught speaking by using cooperative learning. The students found the beneficial of applying 

cooperative learning in their speaking, they, therefore, supported the application of this strategy. 

In addition, this research revealed that cooperative learning is a good teaching strategy to 

improve students’ speaking ability that helps the intermediate learners of EPCC to achieve the 

learning goal. Through cooperative learning, the students perceive that they were be able to 

communicate idea clearly, to be able to understand the idea of their friend easily, the students 

were able to interact with others in a group, etc. 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Basnight-Brown, Dana M, Lang Chen, Shu Hua, Aleksandar Kostić, and Laurie Beth Feldman. 

“Monolingual and Bilingual Recognition of Regular and Irregular English Verbs: Sensitivity 

to Form Similarity Varies with First Language Experience.” Journal of memory and language 57, 

no. 1 (2007): 65–80. 

Hancock, Beverley, Elizabeth Ockleford, and Kate Windridge. An Introduction to Qualitative 

Research. Trent focus group, 2001. 

Juhana, Juhana. “Psychological Factors That Hinder Students from Speaking in English Class (A 

Case Study in a Senior High School in South Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia).” Journal of 

Education and Practice 3, no. 12 (2012): 100–110. 

                                                       
11 Slavin, “Research on Cooperative Learning and Achievement: What We Know, What We Need to Know.” 



  
 

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How the Students Perceive on the Use of Cooperative Learning in Teaching Speaking 

 
 

  

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Kagan, Spencer, and Spencer Kagan. Cooperative Learning. Vol. 2. Kagan Cooperative Learning 

San Juan Capistrano, CA, 1994. 

Law, Jonathan, and Elizabeth A Martin. “Oxford Dictionary of Law.” J. Law, EA Martin.–

[Seventh Edition].–Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009). 

Rahayu, S., N. Ulfatin, B.B. Wiyono, A. Imron, and M.B.N. Wajdi. “The Professional 

Competency Teachers Mediate the Influence of Teacher Innovation and Emotional 

Intelligence on School Security.” Journal of Social Studies Education Research 9, no. 2 (2018). 

Richards, Jack C, and Willy A Renandya. Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current 

Practice. Cambridge university press, 2002. 

Sato, Koichi. “Improving Our Students’ Speaking Skills: Using Selective Error Correction and 

Group Work To Reduce Anxiety and Encourage Real Communication.” (2003). 

Slavin, Robert E. “Research on Cooperative Learning and Achievement: What We Know, What 

We Need to Know.” Contemporary educational psychology 21, no. 1 (1996): 43–69. 

Sugiyono, Prof. “Metode Penelitian Kombinasi (Mixed Methods).” Bandung: Alfabeta (2015). 

 


