Pragmatic competence is trained, I.d. via the use of speech –acts that otherwise do not occur all that frequently in teaching situations such as praising, giving advice, asking clarifying questions. Discourse competence is at the very centre of Inside-Outside-Circle,both when they are listening to the structure of the presentation and when giving feedback to it, and when discussing the structure in teams.
It would be possible to go into much more depth in analyzing this dimension of cooperative learning, but one could sum up the matter in the following way: All aspects of at least the oral side of communicative competence are involved when one works via cooperative learning, for the simple reason that they were include in the concept of the method from the outset. Communicative competence (or at any rate its oral aspects) is in many ways another word for the social competence that is repeatedly referred to in Kagan’s book as one of the prime aims of cooperativelearning in general.
But it is not only the oral side of communicative competence that is taken account of in cooperative learning. The writer side is, too. As far as reading is concerned,this is achieved by the structures often being used in connection with the reading of texts, which either takes place beforehand or,for wxample, in a cooperative reading structure. Written skills are developed i.a. by written processes being built into the structures, so Round Robin, for example, becomes a Round Table where every pupil writes instead of speaking, or Think-pair-squar becomes Write-pair-square,where the first stage is to write something down that then forms the basis of further discussion in pairs and in teams.
In literature on cooperative learning in language and foreign language teaching one can find descriptions of a number of concrete writing activities. In addition,I would again refer to the flexibility of the structures:Since the teach decides the content,(s)he can choose to use them to work on written skills just as/well as anything else.There is, though, a small thing that should be noted here:While the oral side of communicative competence is,so to spesk, integrated into the structures and therefore is trained the whole time,no matter what one is working on, the written dimension will sometimes occur as a structural element, at other times as the actual content that is put into the structures.
Linguistiv awareness
Another point that can be important in this connection is that cooperative earning does not – as one might perhaps be misled to believe – only offer language acquisition as omething that, so to speak, ‘happens on its own while the sutdents are talking about omething ele’.Even though language acquisition occurs to a great extent in this way,most people agree that from time to time there is a need for working in a more focued way on linguistic phenomena. This is also taken account of in cooperative learning, as the sutructures – which are without content – can also, in principle,have for instance a grammatical problem as their content.