Viewpoints of Nursing and Midwifery Students Toward Desirability of Collaborative Learning in the English Language Course

Teaching is not only transfer of knowledge, but also, it is an interaction between the learner and the teacher. Thus, student participation in the teaching–learning process can be important and effective in learning. This study was performed to investigate the viewpoint of nursing and midwifery students regarding desirability of collaborative learning in their English language courses.
This intervention study was conducted with the participation of 47 students of Kerman Razi School of Nursing and Midwifery. At the beginning of the course, adequate explanations on student participation in teaching was given. The process of participatory teaching was performed during each session in ten steps. During the last meeting, data were collected using a questionnaire consisting of demographic variables of collaborative teaching procedures. Data were analyzed using SPSS software version 17.
The findings showed that most students prefered to be taught by the teacher and collaborative teaching was less favorable. The most favorable was "the text read by the teacher", "teaching a lesson by the teacher" and "analyzing the text words by the teacher". The least desirables were “translation by two or more students using a dictionary at any given time” and “translation by two or more students without using a dictionary”.
The results showed that students favoured a lesson that was purely taught by the teacher. The nature of an English course probably yielded these results. Therefore, collaborative teaching should be started at lower levels so that students at higher levels are familiar with this method of teaching.