How Collaborative Learning Supports Literacy

      Collaborative Learning is when children interact with one another; they work together in groups or pairs (to solve a problem, to complete a task, or to reach a goal together).
        Collaboration is extremely important in terms of literacy because when children talk with each other about books they are reading, they can help each other to understand the book better. They can discuss the characters in the story and how they feel about the characters. They can also come up with a list of character traits and adjectives that describe the characters in the story. The students can talk about the events in the story and share personal experiences that they had which relate to what the character is going through. The students can also work together to figure out the plot of a story, the problems in the story, they can work together on summarizing a story etc... When children work together they are able to brainstorm/ share ideas and hear another person's opinion of the book. They are also able to help each other to better comprehend the story because one partner may have grasped the story better than another partner...Sometimes a partner can have an insight into a story that another parter never thought about, this also helps a child to better understand a story through diverse perspectives of the story content.
           Through collaborative learning, children are also able to learn how to work with students from all different nationalities and backgrounds and they are also gaining skills on how to socialize with their peers, how to work as a team, how to work in pairs or groups, how to take turns reading, how to look at a story from another person's point of view etc... When children read to each other they are also assisting each other in sounding out words etc...
          Collaborative learning also helps children with their writing. The teacher could put two or three students in the writing center and their job could be to help each other to brainstorm ideas for a prompt the teacher has assigned. (Sometimes it is hard for a child to come up with an answer to a prompt on his or her own, therefore when children work together, this benefits the children that are struggling). When children work together during writing time, they can also gain a better understanding of their writing mistakes by having their partners read their story or prompt and look for spelling and punctuation errors. When children are able to pinpoint and find mistakes in their partner's paper, this helps them to avoid making those same mistakes in their own writing.
         Lastly, collaborative learning allows children to socialize with one another, with a specific purpose or goal in mind. This hopefully keeps all the group members engaged, and also breaks up the structured day.
        Collaborative learning in terms of literacy helps children to fit the pieces of a story together in both their understanding of the story and in their writing about the story (because more than one brain is working together to accomplish a goal).