On Application Of Cooperative Learning Approach To College English Listening Teaching

Cooperative Learning (CL) is a creative, effective, theoretic and strategic teaching approach, which is widely employed in Foreign Language Teaching. There have been growing numbers of researches to show positive effects of CL. However, the uses of the approach in college English listening teaching (CELT) are few and far between. According to the changing syllabuses in college English language teaching from 1985 to 2007, the reform on college English teaching tends to put more emphasis on listening and speaking, especially the listening competence. Therefore, this research intends to apply the approach to CELT. It is expected that CL may arouse students'interests in English listening study and improve their English listening proficiency.The paper first illustrates the present state of CELT in China; then takes up the following points:the definition of CL, its theoretical basis, the essential elements and the methods of CL. The operation of this study is made up of two questionnaires, the interviews, the pretest, the teaching experiment, the posttest, and the data analyses. For the teaching experiment,16 weeks were spent. The 107 non-English majors from two different teaching classes in Xi'an Technological University were chosen as the subjects. Judging from the interviews, the classroom observation and the data analyses of the questionnaires, the findings indicate that the approach of CL is heartily accepted by the students. According to the analysis of the pretest and posttest by SPSS 11.5, the listening academic result of the experimental class is higher by 0.60 points on the average scores than that of the controlled class after the experiment, but quite lower before the experiment, in which the tested class was operated with CL but the controlled one with the traditional teaching method. This result proves that the students in the experimental class performed much better than those in the controlled class and the former's English listening improvement has been a little shock.The implication of this paper is that the applying the approach of CL to CELT is quite beneficial, effective and significant. And since the approach has positive and effective influence on CELT, it can be regarded as an appropriate method to go on to be used in CELT and even in other classroom courses of English teaching. However, there are still some inevitable defects or problems and some proper measures should be prepared to solve these weaknesses for the further use of the approach.