| Cooperative Learning (CL), proposed by American educators in the early 1970s, has increased in the application in education dramatically since the late 1970s and continues to increase at a rapid rate. However it is still a new teaching theory and model in China and more and more teachers attempt to use it for educational reform. Although a rapidly growing number of educators use CL at all levels of schooling and in many subject areas, very little research has been conducted so far at the vocational colleges, which is growing rapidly in number as well as popularity because of its characteristics.The researcher tries to introduce CL approach into vocational college English teaching, aiming at a tentative study to find out if CL really works at vocational college. Therefore, this paper is a study on how to use cooperative learning to assist English language teaching and learning in a vocational college. It introduces the basic principles of CL, summarizes some major researches and their findings and describes how it is applied in a particular classroom teaching context in order to enhance students'interest in learning English, raise their self-esteem, and improve their speaking ability in a communicative atmosphere.This study is based on a series of teaching experiments. It involves one experimental class, which is exposed to CL instruction, and one control group that receives traditional teacher-frontal instruction. Through the analysis of data of the learners'written and oral tests, questionnaires, interview, learning and teaching journals, the researcher analyzes and discusses the experiment effects in detail and observes the change of affective factors.After the research, the findings are summed up as the following: CL can increase students'interest and motivation in learning English. It can enhance students'self-esteem and confidence. CL can improve students'speaking ability, though there is no significant link between students'overall written test achievements and CL.
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