When reading the scenario for this topic, the first thing that came to my mind was the extent to which I am trasnparent in explaining to my students the difference between these two working formats.

First things first, the two verbs “to collaborate” and “to cooperate” are often used interchangeably to mean people working jointly towards a common goal, but are they? With a quick look at many dictionaries, one will realize that there is hardly a difference between the two verbs. Take, for instance, Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of the word “collaborate” means “to work with someone else for a special purpose”, and the word “cooperate” means “to act or work together for a particular purpose, or to be helpful by doing what someone asks you to do”. Both definitions suggest the act of working together towards a common purpose. However, there is an interesting use of the adjective “a special purpose” in contrast to “a particular purpose”. Special suggests the uniqueness of the purpose, while particular suggests the specificness of the purpose. In other words, when collaborating, the outcome is not clearly anticipated, whereas when cooperating, the outcome is predefined, and people have to negotiate their roles to accomplish it. In addition, the meaning of the word “cooperate” has an additional layer (the second part of the definition) where people are still working jointly, but they are helping each other by completing different parts of the work. The word “helping” means that each one completes a part of the work, and they come together at the end to bring it all together.

While the difference between the two words in the common use is not transparent, the two words are clearly different in language learning contexts, especially in relation to one of the most innovative approaches; Task-Based Language Learning. Collaborative tasks engage language learners in processes of meaning negotiation where they actively use the language and solve emergent language problems such as searching for missing words or correcting each other’s mistakes, all of which are conducive to language learning. Opportunities for meaning negotiation while learners are only distributing the workload are reduced as learners are just helping each other to produce something common, which the definition of the word “cooperate” covers.

In my teaching, I always underscore the importance of creating “collaborative learning tasks” where learners are negotiating for meaning. However, I never considered highlighting the difference between tasks where learners are collaborating or cooperating. Since collaborative tasks are conducive to language acquisition, my teacher students should know how to create effective collaborative tasks and should be able to reflect on the way their learners engage with the tasks. To fulfill this, I added this focus to one of my seminars, where I presented two activities that illustrated the difference between collaborative and cooperative tasks. Before presenting the two tasks, I reminded them of the affordances of collaborative tasks on language learning. The slides below are from the course material:

Afterward, I introduced the activities, which are as follows:

Activity 1: Students were asked to work in teams of 5 to build the tallest free-standing tower in 18 minutes by using a number of spaghetti sticks and one marshmallow that had to be on top.

Activity 2: Students were asked to answer a number of questions based on a previous seminar and had to create a Padlet (a tool unfamiliar to most of them) where they put their answers. However, they had only 8 minutes to perform all the steps in this activity.

After completing each activity, I asked the students to visualize their working process by drawing on the whiteboard anything that depicted how they worked together. All the students agreed that in the first activity, they were working together and they felt more responsible for achieving the task jointly. On the contrary, in the second one, they divided the work between them as there was a short amount of time in addition to the unfamiliarity of the tool as they had to learn how to create an account, etc. They also referred to the noise level: it was much more noisy in the first activity, in contrast to, the second one. It was an interesting discussion about the reasons behind the two strikingly different working processes. I then introduced several strategies to facilitate participation in small groups and increase the likelihood of students collaborating and thus communicatively learning the language. These strategies are taken from the list of readings in Topic 4 (Brindley et al., 2009).

By doing this, I believe I managed to highlight the difference between collaborating and just helping each other to complete different parts of the work individually. The seminar was significantly thought-provoking and illuminating, as was evident from the students’ exit tickets. End!

Reference:

Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).