The Effectiveness of Cooperative Learning in Teaching English for Specific Purposes to the Students of Nursing Regarding Pronunciation

Introduction: Language teachers can help students improve their learning of English by employing different approaches and taking into consideration various learning styles of their students. This study is an attempt to reveal the effect of cooperative learning (CL) on enhancing nursing students’ English pronunciation.

Methods: Twenty five nursing students and thirty midwifery students in Yasuj University of Medical Sciences took part in this quasi experimental study as the intervention and the comparison groups, respectively. CL was implemented with the intervention group, dividing them into groups of five while the comparison group was taught through the traditional method. Phonetic transcriptions were used along passages taken from the English for the Students of Medicine (ESM) I book with both groups. The data, collected from three oral tasks, scores of pre-test, midterm and final written examinations, were analyzed using the SPSS software, version 19, through independent sample t-test.

Results: The results of the study showed that the intervention group outperformed the comparison group significantly (P<0.05) in all areas of oral tests and pronunciation.

Conclusion: This study suggests that CL helped significantly to enhance the nursing students' pronunciation. Teaching pronunciation, done in a cooperative context, yields better learning in students.