Research On Application Of Cooperative Learning In Teaching English Writing In High School

Cooperative learning is a creative and effective teaching theory and strategy, which started in the United States of America in the 1970s and made practical improvement in the mid-1970s and 1980s. It is called the most needed and successful teaching revolution in the latest 10 years. It requires that teaching must be student-centered and group activities should be the basic teaching form, which enables students to develop the i r i n i t i at i ve and mot i vat i on to meet the i r needs of per sonal potential ability.The thesis inquires into the theories of cooperative learning and English-wr it ing teaching . The former includes the intention and components of cooperative learning, the basic theories of cooperative learning, the English subject criterion and the present situations of cooperative learning. The latter includes the basic theories of English-writing teaching, the English subject criterion and English writing methods. Then, the thesis looks into the relationship betweencooperative learning and English-writing teaching from the present problems existed in the senior high English-writing teach i ng.With the help of the theories of cooperative learning and English-writing teaching, I made an experiment about the cooperative learning in EngIish writing. The third chapter of the thesis describes the experiment, which includes the preparation for the experiment, the experiment design, the procedures of the exper i ment and the resu I ts of the exper i ment. At the first step,. I got to know from a questionnaire that the students didn't understand the meaning of cooperative learning and have seldom experienced cooperative learning. By another questionnaire I found that students were generally not interested in English writing. The traditional way of evaluation might not be able to help students improve their writing abi I ities> effectively. A pre-experiment examination showed that the writing levels of the experimental class and the controlled class don't differ clearly. All of the above preparations help to compare students' opinions about cooperative learning and English-writing teaching and theirwriting abilities before and after the experiment.According to the teaching theory of cooperative learning, 1 designed a series of group tasks for the students, including writing cooperatively, correcting students' compositions cooperatively and establishing an class newspaper cooperatively to enable students to learn writing in groups.Learning wr it ing cooperatively develops students' wr it ing skills as well as listening, speaking and reading skills. Correct i ng the compos i t i ons cooperat i ve I y requ i res students to correct others' compositions under the instructions of the teacher. By doing this, the students learned to avoid making s imi I ar mi stakes i n thei r own compos i t i ons. The task of EngI i sh class newspaper needs to be completed after class. Students needed to search for materials, write articles and then show the completed newspaper to the class. Group members had to cooperate thoroughly to complete the task.In this experiment, I adopted different ways to evaluate the above kinds of cooperative learning, such as examination, teacher's comments of the correction of the compositions and the class voting for the best English class newspaper. Asexpected, these different ways of evaluation were both objective and encouraging, and the students benefited a lot from them.The thesis also looks into the relationships between students and teachers as well as students and students. The results or the experiment show that whi le they were working on the tasks, students' consciousness of cooperation was strengthened. Their cooperative ski I Is were improved. Further more, their interest in EngI ish writ ing greatly increased. As a result, they made a lot of progress in writing. They could even experience the pleasure of participating in teaching and learning. In groups, students encouraged and helped each other, wh i ch was qu i te he I pf u I i n i ncreas i ng the i r se I f-conf i dence and lower ing thei r anxiousness as we I I as i nspi r ing thei r wr iti ng motivation. The democratic, equal and harmonious relationship between the students and the teacher changed writing into an enjoyable activity.