Fostering College English Learners' Autonomy Through Cooperative Learning Approach

The purpose of English teaching in college is the cultivation of students'communicative competence as well as the ability to use English,so the methods of teacher-centered are inadequate in large-class English language teaching, resulting in such problems as the students'passive learning attitude, the difficulty in giving and receiving feedback in time, the less oral practicing time. To activate students in the classroom, the researcher have tried the cooperative learning approach to improve learner's autonomy. A number of studies have also shown that cooperative learning (CL) has increasingly become a pervasive educational approach in the world. As a theoretic and strategic system applied by many countries in the world in the past three decades, CL has been proved that is a creative and effective teaching approach.The purpose of this thesis is an attempt to find out the potentially positive relationship between these two theories (AL and CL)and the effective impact of CL-inspired college English teaching and learning on cultivating and developing students'AL. The researcher has chosen medical care major from two freshmen classes in Hebe Women's Vocational College, one as Control Class, and the other one as Experimental Class. The research adapted both quantitative and qualitative designs. During the two-term empirical study, the instruments such as tests, questionnaires, classroom observation and interview were implemented in making the empirical study more persuasive and meaningful. Meanwhile, to make the comparison between the experimental and control groups more clearly and accurately, SPSS software and Excel2003 were adopted in the statistical analysis after the data collection.During a whole years'study, it is shown CL surely can affect the students'learning achievements, especially cultivate and improve their AL. And English learning is no more a burden but pleasure to them, most of students'enthusiasm of learning English has been stimulated.Both theory and practice outcomes prove that cooperative learning is undoubtedly an effective teaching approach, as long as it is utilized properly.The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to the whole thesis focusing on scope of the research and the significance of the study and thus proposing the practical application of CL in helping students improve their AL abilities. Chapter Two introduces some related rationale about CL and AL. Chapter Three is the research design, including researching questions, researching instruments, ways of analysis the data. The Chapter Four are the major parts of this research, including the arrangement of there search, its specific steps and the actual fulfillment of the whole research and the detailed analysis and discussion on the basis of the data collected and calculated through the whole research. Chapter Five is a natural conclusion of this research, which talks about the implications of this language teaching research.The researcher makes some elementary exploration of the application of CL into college English teaching and learning, in order to improve the current situation of college English teaching and learning, especially raise learners'awareness in AL. On the basis of the practical operation of the whole research, it is hoped that this study could be reference for further development of AL, curriculum design, evaluation means and teacher training.