Students' Partner Selection for Cooperative Work in a
Dual Language First Grade Classroom
Teri Lynn Foster (UC Santa Barbara)

Language and its uses for learning and communication in bilingual classrooms has been of special interest to me for some time. As a veteran bilingual teacher the academic achievement gap between ethnic groups has been of primary concern for me. I discovered that cooperative learning was an educational innovation which addressed this issue. However, I had questions about how it would look in a bilingual situation and what effect it would have on my native Spanish speaking and native English speaking students' learning and language acquisition. As I looked to the research to help answer my questions, I found that studies in classrooms where students of different languages worked together were rare. As a result, I have devoted much of my research to finding out how bilingual education and cooperative learning can work together for the academic, social, and language development of students in dual language bilingual classrooms.

The purpose of the study was to examine work partner choices for cooperative tasks in an ethnically and linguistically diverse classroom. Of particular interest were the circumstances under which students chose cooperative work partners from different ethnic and/or native language groups than themselves. An analysis of the community and school context provides the reader with the conditions under which the findings occurred.

Rationale for the study revolves around the fact that throughout the last decade the movement in education has been away from the "traditional" or teacher-centered classroom. Now the goal is a "thinking, meaning-centered" curriculum where social interaction is a key to learning (Forman and Cazden, 1994). However, because California public schools continue to experience a dramatic increase in ethnic and language minority students, more research is needed in order to determine how social interaction strategies can be effectively implemented in diverse educational settings. For example, the number of Limited English Proficient (LEP) students in California public schools in the Spring of 1996 was 1,323,787, an increase of almost 5% from Spring of 1995 (Macías, 1996). Teachers are struggling to find ways to incorporate interaction strategies, such as cooperative learning, into diverse language classrooms.

Furthermore, it is imperative that we prepare our students for a place in tomorrow's career market. In that workplace, people must have the ability to work in teams and problem solve with others (Anderson, Reder, and Simon, 1996; Calderón, 1990; Hamm and Adams, 1992; Holt, 1993). In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times (July 2, 1996), Swoboda reported that Reich, then the United States Secretary of Labor, had included knowing how to work in teams as one of the five most important skills needed in finding and keeping a job today. The bilingual classroom gives students the potential benefit of practicing teamwork skills with others from diverse backgrounds.

Therefore, the site for this study was chosen because the bilingual classroom contained both native Spanish-speakers and native English-speakers and because cooperative learning was a part of the everyday life. I collected data using ethnographic methods (e.g. participant observation, notetaking, video taping, and audio taping) in this first grade classroom from March to June of 1996. Spradley's Participant Observation (1980) served as a guide to the data collection and analysis. Video and audio tapes were used to capture cooperative activities and peer interactions. Interviews with teachers, the principal, and students added different perspectives to enhance confidence in the results.

Many educators agree that teaching, as a primarily communicative process, is effectively analyzed using qualitative methods (Bloome, 1991; Furlong and Edward, 1977; Green and Dixon, 1993; Green and Harker, 1982; Gumperz, 1981). For this reason I have used the qualitative methodologies of micro-ethnography and sociolinguistics. Micro-ethnography furnishes the means for breaking down the complex interactions within the classroom so that patterns can be seen (Green and Harker, 1982). From there, sociolinguistics provides a way to make visible what is happening within specific conversations (Hymes, 1974). Along with these qualitative methods, the learning and language acquisition theories of Cummins (1982), Krashen (1982), Slavin (1990), and Vygotsky (1978) served as lenses through which to observe this interaction.

The analysis for this dissertation is divided into three chapters, each providing more and more microlevels of analysis. The first chapter provides a broad view of the community climate around bilingual education and of the school's philosophy of second language acquisition and collaborative learning. The second layer of analysis examines ways interaction was facilitated through use of space, time, and language in this particular bilingual classroom. The last chapter focuses on student selection of cooperative partners within the context of this diverse classroom. The understandings that each level of analysis uncovers reveal richer, deeper, and hidden understandings of what opportunities for learning this particular situation affords native speakers of both Spanish and English.

An important contribution to the literature is made in that researchers and teachers alike are shown consequences of incorporating cooperative learning into the linguistically diverse classroom. Further, the study reveals potential benefits (previously unexamined) of educating diverse populations together. Within that setting, the effects of allowing students to choose their own partners for cooperative tasks are shown.

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