Developing Cooperative Learning through Tasks in Content and Language Integrated Learning

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study on teachers’ perceptions regarding specific work with tasks in the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) classroom, a context where academic content and a foreign language are learnt simultaneously. A questionnaire consisting of closed and open questions was administered to 25 teachers working in a school participating in an innovative project based on the implementation of tasks used as an instrument to promote cooperative learning. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the teachers worked in collaboration to design tasks that were organised and linked around a common topic. These crosscurricular themes were selected in the different subjects with the objective of making students work towards a common final goal through several developmental stages. The results of the study show that the teachers are concerned about the methodological difficulties that the use of tasks entail, about their own ability to cope with them, and about the problems that they encounter to collaborate. However, the teachers also value the benefits of this strategy in terms of achievement of learning objectives, and display a high degree of motivation to continue working with this model.