Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to assess the implementation and challenges of cooperative learning in
English class room grade 11 students at Nibretie Bizuneh Secondary and Preparatory School. Both the
students and teachers involvement in the implementation of cooperative learning, teachers and students
attitude towards cooperative learning in English classroom, the major challenges that hinder to
implement cooperative learning were addressed in the researcher. The researcher employed descriptive
research design. Five teachers were selected purposively and seventy five students were selected
randomly as source of data. Data were collected via observation, interview and questionnaire. The
researcher also employed mixed method of data analysis. The quantitative data represented by frequency,
percent, mean and grand mean.
This study confirmed that the teacher’s roles such as creating positive classroom environment, planning
the arrangement of the class room, organizing collaborative group, assigning academic tasks,
determining the number of member students in the group, deciding how long the group will work
together, preparing materials for distribution to the group for assessment, determining the roles of the
group members (master/ team leader, Checker, recorder, editor, gatekeepers, praise, and monitoring,
assessing and evaluating of each group's performance were not functional. This confirmed that the
elements: positive interdependence, face-to-face promotional interaction, individual and group
accountability, social skills, and group processing were not practically implemented. Students' lack of
social skills and lack of attitude large class size, lack of instructional materials, adapting lecturing
method as a trend and large volume of the text book were seen as challenges to implement CL.
