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Cooperative learning is designed to engage learners actively in the learning process. Through inquiry and interaction with peers in small groups, learners work together towards a common goal. As a major movement within the broad context of the educational mainstream, cooperative learning has specific relevance for literacy and language learning. Communicative approaches to second/foreign language teaching can effectively draw on the principles and characteristics of cooperative learning to make language teaching and learning more effective. This joining of communicative instructional approaches with cooperative learning should be effective whether applied to the second/foreign language classroom or to the sheltered classroom integrating language learning with content-area learning.

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of-the-Woods CollegeContrasts in the simultaneous acquisition of two languages in bilingual children support the theory that languages share deep structures and that differences derive from language-specific rules.Twelve bilingual children, age 6 to 8, participated in a study of the sequencing and rate of acquisitions for late-developing syntactic structures. Comprehension tests examined linguistic competence over a wide range of structures. A statistical analysis provided the basis for interpreting the general pattern of acquisitions; case grammar gave the framework for the linguistic analysis.Empirical evidence points to a parallelism in the acquisition of shared structures. Differences reflect language contrasts. If one assumes that first and second-language learning a r e qualitatively the same processes, the sequential order in which the bilingual child acquires the structures of his two languages may have significance for the adult learner of English and for the development of TESOL materials. Nature of the studyThrough hypothesizing, testing, and evaluating, children internalize' the s e t of rules that account for the grammar of the language to which they a r e exposed. When the linguistic environment is multilingual, they construct grammars of the languages with which they a r e in contact, usually without formal instruction.An investigation was made of a selected group of twelve children, ages 6 to 8, bilingual in Italian and English, who had been living in the bilingual environment of the Italo-American community of South Philadelphia for at least three years. The basic hypothesis of the investigation was that structures shared by Italian and English develop in the same order and at the same rate in the bilingual child, since, theoretically, shared structures should find their source in a common underlying base and a r e realized by the Same set of transformational rules. For bilingual children some of the rules in their grammars a r e shared by the two languages; others a r e unique to each.

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