The 8th graders' perception of elements in cooperative learning in an English classroom

Teachers sometimes assign their students to work in a cooperative way. However, the application of cooperative group work is usually not very structured. Some problems which usually occur when doing cooperative learning are ‘free riders’, noisy classrooms, and takes a lot of time to implement. This study is aimed to know the 8th graders’ perception of cooperative learning in using modeling or simulation of group work, role of group members, and group naming. The writer used a set of questionnaires adapted from Tamah (2017) and interviews. From the questionnaires and the interviews, the results showed there was high preference to learning English using cooperative learning. Based on the students’ answer it was indicated that they liked cooperative learning because they could help one another, and the assignments could be finished faster, and they could work together as a team.