The aim of this paper is to reexamine the concept “Cooperation in Education.” There is no doubt that many teachers and educationists regard “cooperation in education” as important. However, implementing and continuing cooperative learning processes in the actual classroom setting faces many difficulties. I will try to examine the reasons for these difficulties, looking at what I will call a “structural defect in public education.”

This “Structural Defect” is concomitant with the function of socialization in public education, and it necessitated by the variety of children attending school. On the other hand, “Cooperation” is a methodology for letting children establish good human relations, and it may be said that it is a “third way” for maintaining classroom order.

  This paper reports the results of a study that investigated the relationship between communication apprehension in group work and the beliefs about group work in college English classrooms. Many studies on cooperative learning（CL）have focused on its effectiveness, and research on students’ perception is scarce. Moreover, no studies have closely examined Japanese students’ beliefs about group work and its relationship with the level of communication apprehension（CA）.

  A questionnaire was constructed to measure CA, beliefs about cooperation as a value, beliefs about efficiency of group work, beliefs about academic growth through group work, relationships with other group members, and beliefs about classroom instruction in college. It was administered to 123 college sophomores. The results showed they were neither free from nor excessively concerned with communication apprehension. Group CA negatively correlated with the beliefs about group work, and all the beliefs about group work were positively correlated with each other.

I have analyzed how a small groups of senior high school students cooperated in reading GENJIMONOGATARI（THE TALE OF GENJI）rapidly and give an outline in the class by using protocol analysis. As a result, I found that they tried to comprehend the story cooperatively through the following six processes of "a strategy of cooperative problem solving".

  1. Promotion of frequent interaction within the groups

  2. Monitoring the speech and the reaction of other members

  3. Utilization of their own knowledge to compensate their lack of comprehension

  4. Reasoning and anticipating the story through contextual comprehension

  5. Building a temporary interpretation with the agreement of all members

  6. Modification of the partial comprehension of the story through the recognition of its whole structure