INTEGRATING CHARACTER EDUCATION INTO ENGLISH TEACHING THROUGH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING :A Case of Class 3 A of SDN Sendang Mulyo 04Kota Semarang

The newest issue which come is the Curriculum of 2013. The major point of the national curriculum changes emphasizes on the elementary school curriculum. It assumed that elementary school is the basic school environment for children to develop their social interactions by providing just basic intellectual knowledge and more emphasizing the activity to promote characters. Teaching English for elementary school recently then also gains its momentum to reform. Integrating character education into teaching English requires smart strategy as presenting values-based atmosphere inside and outside classroom, which allow students to move to increasingly higher levels of moral development. One of the recent approaches to foster students’ positive character is Cooperative Learning (CL). This research is conducted to measure the effectiveness of CL techniques to foster students’ academic achievement and promote their positive characters in learning English at SDN Sendang Mulyo 04, Semarang. As it is done in English classroom context, there are two kinds of students’ achievements which are measured, they are English academic achievement and positive characters. It employs Time-Sample Experimental Design, as the research design. It is argued as the suitable research design in observing personal growth since this kind of student’s development requires numerous continuesly observations of the sample individually, within the same group of samples (Cohen, 2007: 284; Tuckman, 1978: 141). The sample population was students in Class 3 A of the 2013 academic year. It had 23 students. As it is suggested in the research design, the observations were done in 2 cycles and each cycle contained 2 phases; first phase was controled activities and the second phase was experimental activities. The controlled activities were taught in the traditional method of Grammar Translation and Audio-Lingual approach. The first experimental activities were taught in Cooperative Learning techniques of Paraphrase Passport and Think-Pair-Share, and the second ones were Round Robin Brainstorming and Three-Step Interview. The findings of this study suggested that Cooperative Learning helped the elementary school students to enhance oral and written communicative competence as well as their characters development slightly significant.