Co-Teaching in EFL Classroom: The Promising Model

Abstract

The research aimed to examine whether co-teaching in EFL classrooms could have positive impacts on students’ learning outcomes and their overall academic performance, including the improvement of the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). The experiment of the study was conducted throughout the summer course of 2018 for six weeks at the College of Basic Education with a class of 24 female students. The classes were held every day for one hour and twenty minutes. A simultaneous comparison between two classrooms was conducted in which one class was taught by a single instructor (the control group), and the other class was based on co-teaching (the experimental group). The two groups were taught by Khalifa AlKhalifa and Dalal Boland who acted as “one brain in two bodies” in their EFL classroom. Numerous sittings took place before each class to discuss how the lesson was to be divided between them and to reach an agreement on several matters, such as which instructor would deliver the lesson, which activities were to be solved, and how the second instructor would be beneficial in providing support and assistance to students throughout the entire class period. Moreover, both instructors established goals and objectives for every lesson and made sure that students meet those objectives by the end of every class period. Well-established plans and ideas on how to grasp those targets were agreed upon throughout the implementation of different materials to cover the content of the syllabus. After the summer semester came to an end and when the class average of both classes was compared, the results proved that the students who were in a co-taught classroom showed a significant improvement in their academic performance, whereas students who were taught solely by one instructor showed less improvement in their overall academic skills. This shows that well-planned co-teaching programs could lead to better student support within classroom settings, which consequently leads to improved EFL learning.