Activities
A Check your understanding of Learning Strategy Training,
Cooperative Learning, and Multiple Intelligences.
1 State in your own words the difference between language training and learner
training.
2 It has been said about cooperative learning that it attempts to teach students to
‘think us, not me.’ What do you think that this means?
3 Categorize each of the following eight activity types into the type of intelligence it
likely taps. There is one intelligence for each: Listening to lectures, tapping out
the stress patterns of sentences, cooperative tasks, goal setting, map reading, TPR,
growing plants in a window box in the classroom, surveying students’ likes and
dislikes, and graphing the results.
B Apply what you have understood about Learning Strategy
Training, Cooperative Learning, and Multiple Intelligences.
1 Interview a group of students about the learning strategies they use to facilitate
their language acquisition. Are there any patterns? Are there strategies that might
help your students if they knew how to use them? If so, plan a lesson to teach one.
See what results.
2 Goodman (1998: 6) has written that ‘one essential tenet of cooperative learning is
the notion that any exercise, course material, or objective ... may be reformulated
into a cooperative experience.’ With this in mind, think back to a recent exercise
you asked your language students to do. How could you have reformulated it in
such a way as to be consistent with cooperative learning principles?
3 Make a list of your most commonly used language teaching activities. Try to
determine which intelligences or which of Gardner’s five minds they work on. If
there are intelligences/minds that are not included in your list, see if you can
change the way you do the activities to include it/them. Alternatively, consider
adding activities which work on the missing intelligence(s)/minds to your
repertoire.
