An Empirical Study Of Vocabulary Learning At Tertiary Level By Non English Majors In A Cooperative Classroom

This thesis reports an empirical study that examines the relationship between cooperative learning and achievement on college English vocabulary learning through experiments. The study was undertaken for the purpose of finding a new mode of vocabulary learning to help college students learn vocabulary more effectively and improve their ability to use the vocabulary that they have learned. Two questions are addressed in the study: 1) Whether there will be a significant difference in the achievement on vocabulary learning between subjects who learn cooperatively and those who learn individually. 2) Whether there is a positive connection between the subjects' attitude and ways of learning in vocabulary acquisition. The subjects involved in this study were 86 freshmen of non-English majors who were admitted into Guangxi University in 2004. After their entering to the university they were placed through the placement test at Level 1 for their English proficiency, arranged in two different classes and both taught by the author (Level 1 is the initial level among the 4 levels for the university's college English teaching). One class, the experimental group was assigned to use cooperative approach in their vocabulary learning while the control group stuck to the traditional approach. After a period of six weeks, their achievement on learning the designated words was evaluated and measured. A modified test based on national CET-4 (College English Test-Band 4) test papers; a questionnaire and interviews were used to collect data in this study. Therefore qualitative data as well as quantitative data were involved. Through data analysis, it is found that learning vocabulary in a cooperative classroom is more effective than doing that in a traditional classroom that treats its students as single units and involves little teamwork or cooperation in class. As for the second question, the author did find out that fewer students in a cooperative classroom take completely negative attitudes towards vocabulary learning than in a traditional classroom even though the result is not totally satisfactory, for the number of students in both groups with completely positive attitudes towards vocabulary learning is zero. More investigations are needed for finding out...