Co-operative goal structure: a

way to improve group activities

George Jacobs

Group activities are used in many aspects of second-language instruction.

Among the reasons cited for their use is that they encourage students to

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work together, helping each other. However, simply putting students
together in a group is no guarantee that co-operation will occur. One factor
affecting the success of group activities is the goal structure present in the
classroom. This article explains the concept of goal structure, illustrates
three principal types of goal structure (co-operative, competitive, and indi-
vidualistic), and highlights the benefits of a co-operative goal structure.
Additionally, the article discusses the effect of learning about goal struc-
tures on the author's teaching methods.

Introduction For many years group activities have been advocated for the second/foreign
language classroom. The mid-1980s have been no exception (see, for
example, Long and Porter 1985). Of course, any set of techniques, no
matter how good it sounds in theory, needs to be examined to discover how
best it can be implemented in practice. This is certainly the case with group
activities. In part because of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of
group activities, it is not uncommon to hear teachers say, 'I tried putting
students in groups a few times, but it didn't work, so I went back to the
regular way.' By describing my own experience using groups in a writing
class, this article examines one way of making group activities more suc-
cessful: the use of a co-operative goal structure.

Initial experiences As a teacher of ESL/EFL, I have sometimes used group activities in my

classes because I believe they promote learning by increasing student
involvement in the class. I used group activities in a writing class for
English majors at a large public university in Thailand. Students worked in
groups of three, reading and giving feedback to each other on composition
drafts. (See Raimes 1987 for examples of how this can be done.) Through
teacher—student journals and my own observations, I monitored how well
the groups were functioning (Jacobs, in press). While there were some
positive results from learners giving feedback on their peers' drafts, there
were also problems.
One of these problems was a lack of co-operation among group members.
Some students complained about group-mates who only wanted to receive
help from others, but were unwilling to give help in return. When I put
students into groups, I hoped they would just naturally co-operate with
each other. But my experience with this class showed that groups did not
necessarily equal co-operation. My expectations about the benefits of group
work had not been justified.

ELT Journal Volume 42/2 April 1988 © Oxford University Press 1988 97
 However, because I still believed that group work had a useful place in
ESL/EFL instruction, I began to look for ways to make group activities
function better. During this search, I found an article in which 'goal
structure' was defined as specifying 'the type of interdependence among
students as they strive to achieve educational objectives' (Johnson 1979:
145). What this meant to me was that the way that the school administra-
tion and I organized the classroom environment affected to what extent
students would want to help each other learn. An explanation of three
major types of goal structure, as described in Johnson's article and in
others, may make the concept clearer.

Thnm typms of goal The literature on 'goal structure' classifies it into three main kinds: co-oper-
structure ative, competitive, and individualistic. With a co-operative goal structure,

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individual participants can only achieve their own goals if the people they
are working with also achieve theirs. For example, a basketball team has a
co-operative structure because by helping their team-mates score baskets,
players are helping their team, and thus themselves win. In a language-
teaching context, one instance of a co-operative goal structure would be in a
writing class when a group works together on their compositions, with all
group members receiving the average of the scores given to the composition
of each group member.
The type of relationship involved with a competitive goal structure is
exactly the opposite of that found in a co-operative goal structure. There is
a negative relation between the possibility of individuals attaining their
aims and their peers doing so also. In other words, one person achieves her
or his goal only if other people do not achieve theirs. An example of
competitive goal structure would be a tennis match. Here, the worse one
person plays, the better is the other's chance to win, and to win by a wide
margin. In writing classes, a competitive goal structure occurs when stu-
dents write compositions and the teacher uses norm-referenced grading, for
example the best composition gets an A and the worst one gets an F.
The third goal structure is an individualistic one. Here, there is no
interrelation between the goal attainments of the people involved. With an
individualistic goal structure, one person's success is independent of
another's. For instance, there is an individualistic goal structure when
swimmers are racing, not to sec who is fastest, but to try to improve their
own personal best times. An individualistic goal structure is present in
writing class when students write their own compositions, and the teacher
uses criterion-referenced grading, i.e. the compositions are graded accord-
ing to how they compare with a pre-determined level of quality and not
with each other.

Onntt superiority of I found that much research on goal structure had been done by scholars in
co-opmrathrm goml education and psychology. Overall, these studies showed a co-operative
rtructurm goal structure to be superior to competitive and individualistic goal struc-
ture on measures of both student achievement and attitude (Johnson tt al.
1981 and Kohn 1986). And, contrary to what many people might expect,
the research has shown that the learning of high-achieving students usually
benefited and never suffered when they were grouped with lower-achieving
peers (Johnson and Johnson 1985).
The only study I found done with second/foreign language learners
(Gunderson and Johnson 1980) reported that co-operative learning groups
encouraged positive student attitudes towards the target language (in this

98 George Jacobs
 case French), and towards their peers and their teacher. A reason for
co-operative learning being particularly beneficial in the second/foreign
language classroom could be that the mutual dependence that co-oper-
atively structured activities require would lead to more communication
among students because they need to exchange information and advice in
order to succeed in achieving their goals (Doughty and Pica 1986). In the
case of a writing class, increased communication would be beneficial in two
ways. First, students would be learning more about how to write in English.
Second, and most important for language learning, students would be
persuaded to speak the target language in their groups more often, and for
reasons other than mere 'practice'. These advantages would benefit, in
particular, monolingual classes, in which the 'need' to use English has to be
carefully constructed.

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Although there is little research on co-operative goal structures in ESL/
EFL, its use is not uncommon. Activities such as jigsaw reading, strip
stories, and 'Spot the Difference' are co-operative learning activities that
are used in many classrooms. For example, with strip stories (Boyd and
Boyd 1980), each student in a group has one sentence of a story. The goal is
for the group to put the sentences in the correct order. Looking at each
other's sentences is not allowed; students must listen carefully as each
group member reads his or her sentence aloud. Thus, students must work
together to succeed.

Looking back After reading about goal structures, I looked back at the writing class I had
taught to see what its goal structure was. Many factors can affect this. They
include the grading system used, students' previous educational experi-
ences, types of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation among students, friend-
ships between students, and societal norms.
As mentioned earlier, the students often worked in groups; so it seemed,
at first glance, that the goal structure was co-operative. However, grades for
compositions, final exams, and the course as a whole were not related to
group members' grades. Instead, the grading system used was a combina-
tion of norm-referenced and criterion-referenced grading. Thus, while it
may have looked as though the class had a co-operative goal structure, the
grading system encouraged students to see their peers' success in learning
to write as either irrelevant to their own interests (individualistic goal
structure) or in contradiction with them (competitive goal structure).
Another factor which may have discouraged co-operation was the kind of
goal structure present during students' earlier learning experiences. Stu-
dents told me that co-operative learning had been rare for them, whether at
primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. This was important, because prac-
tice in working together and training in the skills necessary to do so are key
to successful interaction among students.

Trying agmln The next semester I taught a similar writing course. This time I included
some cooperatively structured group activities. The first step in doing this
was to discuss with the class how they could help each other write some of
the term's compositions. I explained the benefits that could be gained from
working together and also brought up what I had found during the last
semester to be two major objections to group activities: students' lack of
ability and unwillingness to help each other. As to lack of ability, I said that
when giving advice to their peers, students should focus on the specific

Co-operative goal structure . 99

 language features covered in class, for example connectors, and would not
be held responsible for aspects of English other than those covered in class.
On the second objection, about peers' unwillingness to assist others, I
said that grade averaging would be used to encourage students to help their
fellow group members. The way this worked was that in a group of three,
students' grades were calculated by averaging the score on their composi-
tion and the average of their two group-mates' compositions. For example,
if a student's paper got a score of 90, and the two other papers got 85 and 75
(an average of 80), then the student's grade would be 85 (the average of 90
and 80). During the class discussion on using group activities, one student
said she did not want to work in a group. That was allowed. However, later
in the term, this student changed her mind and started working with a
group.

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Another step in the preparation of die class for co-operative learning was
to talk about some of the skills necessary to productive group functioning.
These included making sure everyone participated; paying attention when
others spoke; pointing out good points in compositions, and not only
mistakes; responding to the content, and not only the form; and criticizing
the draft, but not the person who wrote it. Additionally, throughout the
term, I paid attention to how well the groups were functioning, gave advice
and reminders about how to work well together, and brought the attention
of the whole class to instances where students had given good advice.
During the term students did not always work in groups. However, when
they did work in groups, diis was usually co-operatively structured. Most
frequendy, students commented on each other's composition drafts, and
the grade averaging system mentioned earlier was used. On one occasion,
each three-member group wrote a joint five-paragraph composition, with
an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. To help encour-
age participation from everyone in the group, each student first wrote a
separate draft and then the group chose one main paragraph from each
person's draft to use as a start for the draft of the joint composition.
My experiences with different ways of structuring group activities were
in no way a scientifically designed experiment. Nevertheless, I sensed diat
in the second semester, the groups worked together better than diey had in
the other class the previous term. Also, there was less negative reaction
from students about using groups. This, and to a greater extent die large
body of research done in other areas of education and in other settings
(Kohn 1986) encourages me to continue to use co-operatively structured
activities.

Conclusion The intent of this article has not been to maintain that all activities should
have a co-operative goal structure, nor that activities with other goal
structures are not a necessary part of education. But when much is said
about die need for competition in order for countries, businesses, and
individuals to be successful, it should also be pointed out that much
evidence shows co-operation to be the key to success in life in general, as well
as in learning. Perhaps by structuring co-operative interaction among
students in the classroom, we can not only improve the learning that occurs
there, but also possibly make a contribution towards encouraging co-oper-
ation among people outside die classroom as well. For a much fuller
treatment of this topic, and especially for ideas about implementing
co-operative learning, I recommend Circles ofLearning (Johnson el al. 1984).
Received March 1937

100 George Jacobs

Rmfonnc*a Association for Supervision and Curriculum
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Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Johnson, D. W. and R. T.Johnson. 1985. 'The inter-
Doughty, C. and T. Pica. 1986. ' "Information gap" nal dynamics of co-operative learning groups' in R.
tasks: do they facilitate second language acqui- Slavin et al. (eds.): Learning to Cooperate, Cooperating to
sition?' TESOL Quarterly 20/2:305-25. Learn. New York: Plenum Press.
Gunderson, B. and D. W.Johnson. 1980. 'Building Kohn, A. 1986. No Contest. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
positive attitudes by using cooperative learning Long, M. H. and P. A. Porter. 1985. 'Group work,
groups.' Foreign Language Annals 13/1:39-43. interlanguage talk, and second language acqui-
Jacobs, G. In press. 'First experiences with peer feed- sition.' TESOL Quarterly 19/2:207-23.
back on compositions: student and teacher reac- Raimes, A. 1987. Exploring Through Writing. New York:
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Johnson, D. W. 1979. Educational Psychology.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

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Johnson, D. W., G. Maruyama, R. Johnson, D.
Nelson, and L. Skon. 1981. 'Effects of cooperative, 77ra author
competitive, and individualistic goal structures on George Jacobs has an MA in Linguistics with a
achievement: a meta-analysis.' Psychological Bulletin specialization in TESOL from the University of Illin-
89/1:47-62. ois-Chicago. He has taught in Thailand and the
Johnson, D. W., R. T.Johnson, E. Holubec, and P. People's Republic of China. At present he is teaching
Roy. 1984. Circles of Learning. Alexandria, Virginia: in Honolulu.

Co-operative goal structure 101