An Application Of Cooperative Learning Theory In Oral English Teaching At Pre-school Education Normal Schools

In recent years,pre-school education normal schools are facing profound challenges and chances as well.Children English education is received more and more attention.There have appeared bilingual kindergartens everywhere.However, qualified children English teachers are badly needed.Oral teaching takes a large part in children English teaching,so children English teachers should have certain competence in oral English.Besides this,they should also possess some other professional skills,such as interpersonal,performing,and innovating skills,etc.The graduates of pre-school education normal schools are the main teacher resources of children education.However in recent years,it is difficult for pre-school education normal schools to enroll high quality students.Most of the students do not have a good English foundation,let alone communicative competence.In addition,they have high level of affective filter.To cultivate qualified children English teachers and make the graduates more competitive,pre-school education normal schools have to deepen the teaching reform,make English teaching more effective according to the educational aims and the characteristics of the students.Cooperative learning is "a system of teaching strategy,which aims at promoting students' cooperation in heterogeneous groups to achieve common learning goal and awards students according to the achievement of the whole group".Since 1970s, many overseas and domestic researchers have conducted a lot of effective studies on CL.It is applied in diverse school settings and across a wide range of content areas. Extensive researches show that CL can promote a variety of positive affective, cognitive and social outcomes.With a domestic survey of researches on CL application in English teaching,the author finds out that most of them focus on middle schools and colleges,and research conducted at pre-school education normal schools can hardly be found,let alone the application of CL in oral English teaching at such schools.CL emphasizes interaction and communication,accords with oral English teaching and the teaching of pre-school education normal schools and helps to improve students' speaking abilities and cultivate practical talents.Therefore,the author makes a CL experiment lasting for 16 weeks at Shijiazhuang pre-school education normal school.In this research,the author attempts to explore feasible CL activities for her students and the influence of CL on pre-school education normal school students.The study is designed as a quasi-experiment,and takes two natural classes of Grade 07 as the subjects,experimental group and control group.The pre-test shows that the two groups have no significant discrepancy in oral English achievement.In the experimental class,CL strategy is adopted,while in the control class the researcher still adopts traditional English instruction,although group work is also used.Most of the time,the EC is divided into eleven groups with 5 students per group.Usually the students are mixed as heterogeneously as possible.CL activities include:performing songs & rhythms,retelling stories,performing situational dialogues and short plays,so as to cultivate the students' performing,innovating skills, etc.They are carried out not only inside but also outside the class as all the students board at school.The experimental result is investigated by three means:questionnaires, interviews and oral English tests.The findings show that:1.CL is helpful to reduce the EC students' anxiety,increase self-esteem, self-confidence and motivation,which can result in increased effort in oral English leaning and more extensive use of the language.2.The EC students not only significantly outperform the students of the CC in the post-test,but also make significant progress compared with the pre-test.However, the students of the CC do not make much progress.3.CL helps to enhance the EC students' social and professional skills,such as interpersonal,performing and innovating skills,thus lay a solid foundation for their future work and development.