Group Learning--A Practical Strategy In English Language Teaching (ELT) Classroom

Various approaches to English Language Teaching in China have been explored ever since the early 1980s, with a certain fruitfulness, namely, among others, discourse analysis, and the communicative approach have found their way in ELT, but they are still far from satisfactory and popular. In this regard, the author of this study attempts to apply the Group Learning Strategy, to her classes and consequently finds it effective in an unexpectedly desirable manner. Moreover, the author aims at to answer the following research questions and prove the hypothesis:1) Are group learning strategies effective in ELT?Hypothesis: Group learning is an effective way of carrying out interaction. Students working in small groups have more opportunities to practice and use the target language. The whole class is in a quite easy and active atmosphere with a strong motivation and great interest.2) What kinds of problems or difficulties often arise in using this strategy?3) How can we solve or avoid the problems?The thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is an introduction, which gives a very brief account of group learning strategy. In the end the author points out the necessity and validity of carrying out this present study.Chapter Two mainly builds up the theoretical position of language learning strategies. Firstly it deals with the existing different types of definitions, classifications. Then it illustrates the cooperative learning strategy. Finally, some researches on language learning styles are also described in this part.Chapter Three is concerned with the central topic interaction in ELT classroom group learning strategy. Here the author illustrates some issues about ELT classroom interaction. Some previous researches on this topic are alsostated.Chapter Four focuses on the present study. In this part, the author introduces the study methods, the participant selection, and the study procedure and describes the results of the study and the analysis of the results.The last chapter of this thesis concludes the whole paper and gives some advices for the pedagogy and the future research in this field.