ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: IMPLEMENTING COLLABORATIVE LANGUAGE LEARNING APPROACH IN FEDERAL COLLEGES OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

Thesis Title: English Language Teaching: Implementing Collaborative Language Learning Approach in Federal Colleges of Pakistan Most of the college students in Pakistan, irrespective of their gender cannot communicate effectively and confidently in English. Despite the fact that they are taught English as a second language from an early stage of their educational life, they never develop communicative command on English. This incompetency of learners is largely attributed to faulty language teaching system in Pakistan. Keeping in view the effectiveness of sociocultural language learning framework, this research set out to implement collaborative language learning environment in our colleges. The main objective was to analyze whether collaborative language learning will help the learners to improve their listening and speaking skills or not. It also aimed to find out that how successfully collaborative language learning can be implemented within our context as well as to highlight the hurdles which may impede its implementation. To achieve the said purpose, this experimental research was divided into three phases mainly: pre-test, experimental study and post-test. The pre-test assessed the learners’ existing competency level at the beginning of the study. Subsequently, the experimental study was applied following the sociocultural paradigm to assist the learners towards gaining communicative competency by working collaboratively. The post-test, held at the end of the experimental study period, helped to critically evaluate if the collaborative language learning approach had actually supported the learners to enhance their conversational or communicative efficiency in English. As revealed by the findings of the study, the experimental groups performed comparatively better than the controlled groups during the post-test. The participants of experimental study demonstrated better understanding of the ideas, messages and information offered in English, as far as listening skill was concerned. The study also discovered that the experimental performed better in speaking skill tasks registering significant enhancement in their oral proficiency. These findings are quite important as they ascertain the fact that collaborative language learning paradigm can effectively facilitate the learners to enhance their communicative skills a great deal, if implemented carefully and systematically within our context, without bringing about major changes within the existing infrastructure. However, the study suggests that the teachers should be trained, textbooks be revised adding speaking and listening skill focused tasks and assessment system should include communicative skills evaluation so that the teaching of English as a collaborative endeavour can be facilitated and implemented effectively.